


Imbalance

by MaryPSue



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Balance Arc, F/F, F/M, Found Family, Gen, M/M, Major Character Undeath, Metafiction, Post-Canon, Reincarnation, Slow Build, er... sort of?, guess who fucking forgot an entire canon ship tag
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-01 18:29:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13300713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: Pull back until the ring of planets all disappear into the emerald green of the plane of thought, spinning with its eleven partners in the complicated steps of a sedate and ancient dance.Pull back, until you can see the spiderweb of fine, ash-grey cracks that filigree its perfect surface.This is where an entity - or possibly a force - known as the Hunger made its last stand, where it was destroyed once and for all and all of its victims freed. But, as Jeffandrew once said, everything that is was created by something bigger.This is where the world nearly ended. And this is where the world will end again....There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. You're not seeing double, you're just seeing into...the Adventure Zone!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is...an experiment. Hopefully an experiment that will turn out the way I want it to, but if not, then hopefully at least a fun experiment to watch! 
> 
> Will be OC-heavy and meta as _fuck_. Warning: may contain bummers.

We open on a hill, in a park. It’s not a particularly big hill, or a particularly big park - there’s a pond in the middle of it with a fountain, a handful of trees sprinkled throughout, a grassy space where people can toss flying discs or footballs back and forth or spread out picnic blankets or throw toys for excited dogs. A concrete sidewalk runs around the perimeter of the park, meandering up and down and around the soft rolls of the grassy landscape, at one point bisecting the park as it crosses an elegantly curved wooden bridge over the pond. Trees, verdant and lush, partly shield the park from the businesses and streets that encircle it.

This park would be a beautiful place to visit on a bright, hot summer day, when the trees would offer shelter and shade to people relaxing on the sunny swath of grass, the fountain’s spray catching the light like a thousand glittering diamonds. On this day, though, what sunlight does reach the grass is watery, muted. It is early September, and a ragged cover of grey cloud hangs low and smothering over the park. The fountain has been turned off for the season, the frost that has already begun to form around the edges of the pond each morning too dangerous for its delicate plumbing. The trees shiver and sway in the restless wind, blowing cold and smelling of fresh earth under rain. Summer has been chased out of this park by the first chills of fall.

There aren’t many people gathered in the park on this day, what with the threat of rain looming overhead and the chill in the wind. The only people in the park are a young woman, clutching a worn red windbreaker close around her against the wind as she walks around the sidewalk that encircles the park, two teenage boys with a beautiful border collie on an extendable leash, and a man in his late forties or early fifties doing enthusiastic calisthenics in neon exercise wear several decades out of style. 

And, on the hill, four figures in dark, hooded robes.

Pull back, until the brilliant green of the park vanishes into the steel and concrete of the town that encircles it, until the town vanishes into the gently-rolling fields of yellow and green that encircle it, until the highway leading out of the town connects to a city, connects to another, to another, until the web of towns and cities become an intricate filigree of lights spanning a globe that shrinks and vanishes into the distance, dwarfed by the immensity of its sun. Pull back until the ring of planets all disappear into the emerald green of the plane of thought, spinning with its eleven partners in the complicated steps of a sedate and ancient dance. 

Pull back, until you can see the spiderweb of fine, ash-grey cracks that filigree its perfect surface.

This is where an entity - or possibly a force - known as the Hunger made its last stand, where it was destroyed once and for all and all of its victims freed. But, as Jeffandrew once said, everything that is was created by something bigger.

This is where the world nearly ended. And this is where the world will end again.

...

Returning to the park, we see Joaquin, the collie half-dragging him along by the extendable leash he holds in his right hand. She's pulled the leash to its full extension, gleefully testing the limits of her freedom, but Joaquin barely notices. His head is elsewhere.

The powers that he’d gotten from his interplanar cooking lesson hadn’t lasted very long after the shadows all turned to light and vanished, fizzling away into nothing. He’d been hailed as a hero, briefly, but once people started to realise that he didn’t still have superpowers, the attention had faded away as well. 

To be honest, it’s kind of a relief. Joaquin had his hands full enough with graduating high school and his part-time shifts at the food truck; he doesn’t need the pressure of international fame on top of that. And to the people he saved that day, Joaquin knows he’s still a hero - he still gets free coffee and sandwiches at every food truck and cafe for miles, and strangers still stop him in the streets to thank him, to tell him their stories from that day. He never dreamed he’d have such an impact on so many lives. It’s a good feeling - the  _best_  feeling. 

But there’s still one thing that bothers him.

There's no magic on this plane. At least, not the showy, explosive kind that he'd wielded during the Calamity. The inhabitants of the plane of thought have shaped metal and lightning around ideas that, in other planes, would be accomplished with advanced spellwork. They're creative and ingenious with mechanical devices because without magic, they have to be. The bonds between planes are complex and intricately interwoven, but most of what makes it from the plane of magic to the plane of thought can be easily dismissed as good fortune or chance. 

But what happened to Joaquin was nothing like that. So many things should have been impossible. The story and song, the taco, the portal; none of it should have been real. But it  _was_. It happened. To  _him_.

And even though he’s obviously happy and relieved that the shadowy force that had invaded his world was defeated and the strange electric power that had filled him up isn’t needed anymore, and even though he’d never want anyone to get hurt for it to happen...sometimes Joaquin can’t help but wish that something like it would happen to him again.

The handle of the collie's leash jerks forward as the collie suddenly turns and charges towards the hill, nearly tearing the leash out of Joaquin's hand. He stumbles off of the sidewalk, trying to keep his grip on the leash as the collie bounds joyfully into the small copse of trees gathered around the base of the hill. His brother snorts with laughter from the sidewalk behind him as Joaquin tries to dig in his heels and haul the dog up short before she can wrap her leash around a tree. "Julia! Hey, get back here!"

“Retract the leash, dipstick!” his brother laughs, from the sidewalk, as Joaquin skids across the grass.

“I know how to walk my own dog,” Joaquin yells back, managing to pull the collie to a standstill for a moment before she unepectedly charges forward again, yanking him off his feet and dragging him along, into the trees, on his ass.

Julia the border collie does manage to wrap her leash around a tree. Several trees, actually. By the time Joaquin gets back on his feet and makes his way over to where Julia’s sitting, panting happily and looking at him like a dog who knows exactly what she’s doing, the leash is woven around and between so many trees that unsnarling it is going to be a real pain.

“Thanks,” Joaquin mutters sarcastically, crouching down to unclasp the leash from Julia’s collar. “Carlos, can you come help me untangle this l-”

The instant Julia’s free of her leash, she’s gone. Joaquin tries to hold on to her collar, but the border collie nearly bowls him over as she flies, like a sleek, furry bullet, towards the top of the hill.

“Shit!” Joaquin spits out, picking himself up and charging after her.

...

To her credit, Liliana never really meant to join a coven.

She'd just wanted to make some friends. Maybe meet some people who'd go with her to punk concerts or the psychic shop for incense and new tarot cards. Possibly get involved in environmental activism on a local level. Plant a community garden. Grow some sick-ass beans.

But then the Day of Story and Song happened. And all of a sudden, all of Liliana’s friends are into magic. In a big way. If she’s being totally honest? Yeah, she is too. Look, the confirmed - well, semi-confirmed - existence of Garyl the Binicorn alone fulfills about seventy-five percent of her childhood dreams. And, okay, her adult dreams, too. She doesn’t have an entire condo full of fairy and dragon figurines for nothing.

But she's still not entirely sure how she ended up on a hill in the impending rain, in a crushed-velvet cloak from Party City, holding something that Rowan calls an 'athame' but looks suspiciously like the overpriced ornamental dagger with the dragon handle that's been in the jewel case at the local Savers for the last five years. Again.

Somebody's hot-glued tacky purple plastic gems over the dragon's eyes. They wink at Liliana in the greyish half-light.

"The circle is drawn," Rowan intones, raising the red translucent plastic wineglass with the fake skeleton arm for a stem that he calls a 'chalice' towards the sky before clutching it to his chest. "The spirits of the four directions have been invoked. Let the ritual begin."

This ritual business had been Rowan’s idea in the first place, but the other kids (okay, so they’re all in their twenties, but that still makes them kids) had jumped on board so fast that Liliana still has whiplash. Storm had found the actual ritual for opening a planar gateway first, on some deeply sketchy website, and they’ve been tracking down published versions and testing them ever since. Today’s is barely recognisable from the first version of the ritual they tried, from some falling-apart book from the seventies that Rowan tracked down through the university’s inter-library loan system. Liliana suspects that it was originally written with the intent to summon something Satanic, but hey. The kids are having fun.

Privately, Liliana still thinks that it’s all a load of steaming, fresh manure, but, well. It’s not like trying to summon something up with magic they don’t actually have in the first place is going to  _hurt_  anything. 

And the kids mean well. They really want to conjure up something to solve all the world’s problems. Well, and their personal problem of not having Harry Potter magic at their fingertips, but still. That’s not a bubble Liliana’s going to try to burst. 

On cue, Storm and Indigo raise their artifacts - the 'wand', a gold-painted plastic sceptre from a child's dress-up set, and the 'Book of Shadows', a vinyl-bound notebook that Indigo rather convincingly stitched half a plastic eyeball to - up to eye level. Liliana follows suit with the dagger a moment later. Dimly, she feels like the whole thing is faintly ridiculous, but just as she's not sure how she ended up here in the first place, she's also not sure how to extricate herself. 

She'd asked Rowan if he was sure this junk would do the trick, and he'd responded, "The magic does not come from the tools. You heard the tale of the taco. The magic comes  _through_  the tools, from inside of us. It doesn’t matter what the tools look like. What matters is what we believe, what lies within our hearts."

Liliana's pretty sure Rowan isn't the name his parents gave him.

The trees rustle ominously, and a cold wind whips Liliana's cloak around her ankles before blowing it back from her shoulders, revealing the black yoga pants and tank top she'd elected to wear under it in lieu of Indigo's elaborate corset-and-circle-skirt combo or Storm's floofy pirate shirt and fancypants embroidered waistcoat. She can feel the hairs on the back of her neck rising as the wind freezes every inch of exposed skin on contact. Her Party City cloak does absolutely nothing to protect her from the elements. She probably looks really stupid, standing here with her arms in the air, holding this butt-ugly dagger that'd probably snap off at the handle if she tried stabbing anything with it. Her arms are starting to ache, too. She hopes it doesn't start raining.

"O, Goddess!" Rowan booms, and Liliana has to give him credit, he's got the voice for majickal invocations. Or possibly rodeo announcing. She's getting shivers, though that might just be from the cold. "Hear our plea! Bestow upon us Your favour and be with us as we strive to work Your divine will in this time of darkness!"

There’s a low whistle as the wind starts to pick up again, flapping the edges of the coven’s cloaks and Indigo’s skirt. Liliana wrenches her arms back up to their former position, shrugging her cloak sideways to try to keep it from hitting her in the boobs.

Rowan goes on, his voice rising over the growing sound of the wind. “Goddess, we humbly seek Your aid. Open the way between planes, and deliver unto us -” 

The wind blows straight up under Liliana's cloak, flipping it over her face.

She struggles to push it back, cursing under her breath as the wind wraps it around her head. Liliana drops the dagger, tugging at the cheap fabric.

Rowan's shout of, "No! Don't break the circle -" comes too late. But it doesn't matter. The wind dies down, and Liliana pulls the cloak off her head to see - the park, exactly the same as it was before. No immense, holy fire has blasted the earth in a ten-metre radius. No army of demons has marched out of the air. No dread elder god has taken control of Liliana's body (she's pretty sure). For half a second, she thinks she catches a whiff of bitter woodsmoke, but it’s gone before she can even be sure it’s really there. She doesn't feel any different and absolutely nothing has changed.

Rowan actually looks disappointed.

"All right," he says, in the most kicked-puppy voice imaginable. "Let's dispel the circle."

That's when Liliana sees the dog coming up the hill. It's a beautiful border collie, probably the prettiest dog Liliana's ever seen in person. It looks like a model. This dog could have photoshoots. This dog could be in movies. And it's charging up the hill straight for Liliana, with a great big tongue-hanging-out doggy smile on its face.

" _Liliana_ ," Indigo complains, as Liliana drops to her knees to give the dog a scratch behind its ears. Liliana ignores her. The dog probably belongs to the two teenage boys coming up the hill behind it, but she still looks for a collar. Hey, you never know. Maybe sometimes the Goddess likes you so much she gives you free dogs.

Probably not this time, though, as Liliana's fingers close on a collar. She spins it around until she can read the engraved tag that jingles merrily on it.

"Julia," she reads, petting the top of the dog's head. Sweet zombie Jesus, this dog is soft. And panting happily, obviously basking in the attention. If it's some kind of disguised demon taking advantage of their broken circle to manifest in physical reality, well, it probably can't hurt to let it stay manifested for a little while longer. "Who's a pretty girl, Julia? Is it you? Are you the best, prettiest, fastest, softest dog in this whole entire park? Are you -"

Liliana's monologue on doghood is rudely interrupted by the scream.

...

It is too fucking cold.

September is way too fucking early for frost. September is also way too fucking early to need a real jacket. September should be warm enough to go out in a woolly sweater with jeans or thick tights and a cute skirt to pumpkin patches or on hayrides or to farmers’ markets. You should not need six fucking sweaters and an insulated jacket in September. It is too fucking cold and Marial wants her money back. She's not sure at the moment who she would approach about getting said refund, or what the amount would be, but just give her time.

She'd thought taking a walk in the park would be...well, a walk in the park. Now she's fifteen minutes in and shivering in her windbreaker, wishing she'd worn that hoodie she'd decided to leave at home because, after all, it's just the beginning of September! It's not cold enough yet to need anything more than a windbreaker! If she could go back in time fifteen minutes and give her past self a firm shake, Marial would jump at the opportunity.

She pulls her windbreaker closer around herself as she passes by two of the only other idiots to be out here in this stupid, stupid weather, a couple of teenage boys who at least have the excuse of having a dog with them. It takes off into the trees a few seconds after Marial passes by them, and she hears the younger-looking one squawk. Maybe the dog's figured out that it's too fucking cold for this, too.

Tracksuit Guy waves as Marial passes by, like he always does, and Marial nods, once, in acknowledgment. His dedication to calisthenics is pretty impressive, even she has to admit, but the neon 80s tracksuit? She has questions.

She glances up the hill as she passes, and almost looks right over the four dipshits in cloaks. It's not such an unusual sight - there's definitely more than one place in town that sells crystals and curse amulets and overpriced, overdecorated notebooks - but this particular park isn't a usual site for pagan rituals or sabbats or whatever the fuck this is. Marial hopes whatever made them decide those cloaks were a good idea isn't catching.

She starts to turn away, to keep walking, but something stops her. Something holds her in place, staring up at those figures on the hill, which seem to grow taller and darker and more imposing with every second that passes. There’s something about how they’re positioned up there - four of them in a close circle, one to each of the cardinal directions - that reminds her of something. Something from the story and song, yes, the more they seem to loom up there the more they remind her of how she’d pictured the featureless grey figures of the judges on the ash planet as seen from the deck of the Starblaster, but also something else. 

Something she couldn’t possibly have seen.

Marial doesn’t have any time at all to process the strange feeling of deja vu that washes over her, though, because one of the figures’ cloaks flips over their head, and they reach up to try to unwrap it, dropping something that glints even in the dim, overcast light.

It happens fast. Marial barely has time to notice the familiar feeling of lightness, of weightlessness, the numbness creeping fast up her extremities, the sickness building in the pit of her stomach, before - 

In all of the times her heart has failed her, Marial’s never felt anything quite like this before. She has no other way to describe it other than being wrenched halfway out of her body.

The world greys around her, white wisps of the treetops and the cloaks of the four at the top of the hill blowing away in some nonexistent wind, the rich, earthy smell of autumn vanishing into a blast of stinging smoke, then nothing at all. Marial looks down, sees her own windbreaker wisping away at the shoulders, like a watercolour painting someone’s smeared their sleeve through. She’s drifting out of her body to the waist. She can see the blankly surprised look on her own face.

As she watches, the void-white of her own windbreaker, the one she's wearing and not the one on her frozen body, begins, slowly, to bleed through with red.

Then there’s a feeling like she’s been kicked in the chest by a horse’s hind legs, both hooves at once. Marial’s chest explodes with not-quite-pain, her neck snapping back as she’s whiplashed abruptly back into her body. The world is back to dull autumn colours. The air smells of dead leaves and wet dirt. Her entire body aches dully, her chest feels like a hippopotamus sat on it, and the back of her head is smarting where she cracked it on the pavement when she, apparently, fell. Her implanted defibrillator is beeping frantically under her windbreaker, and she feels like death itself just chewed her up and spat her out.

Marial sits up, and promptly blows chunks all over the pavement.

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, spits a couple of times onto the pavement, and straightens up again, wincing. Under usual circumstances, her first thought would be to get herself to an emergency room as fast as possible, make sure that she isn’t going to drop into cardiac arrest again. Somehow, though, Marial is sure that if anything counts as  _un_ usual circumstances, it’s this.

She glances up the hill again, at the four figures, one of whom is now crouched, holding out their arms to a dog that’s barreling up the hill towards them. The two teenage boys are headed up the hill after the dog, and Marial stuffs down the sudden, irrational urge to yell out to them, to warn them - what? What even just  _happened_?

She tests her legs, finds them still aching and a little watery but mostly steady, and pushes herself up. Her defibrillator is still freaking out, so that should probably be her first priority, but hard on its heels is the need to get the taste of stomach acid out of her mouth. 

Marial turns to head back towards the entrance to the park, towards her apartment and where her car is parked, but again, something stops her in her tracks. This time, though, it’s not some mysterious compelling force. No, this time it’s just a crumpled heap of neon fabric lying in the grass.

The scream comes out before she can stop it.

...

Several planes away, Barry J. Bluejeans pauses in the middle of a scythe-swing as a shudder passes through him.

“What’s the matter, babe?” Lup asks, flicking her wrist and sending a fireball after the perp, who's taken the opportunity to try to run. She isn’t even looking. The fireball catches the unfortunate lich square in the middle of the back anyway. The soundless shriek it emits would probably pierce mortal eardrums.

Barry gives himself a little shake.

“I’m not sure, I thought -” He passes his scythe over to Lup, who takes it also without looking, and pats down the fancy waistcoat she helped him pick out when they got this gig, like he’s looking for something in the pockets it doesn’t have. “Did my body just die?”

“Not that I can tell, sexy,” Lup says. “And good thing too, 'cause I’ve got plans for it later tonight.”

“Oh, just reap me already,” the perp moans.

Lup’s grin would put sharks to shame. She raises the scythe.

“Gladly,” she says.


	2. Chapter 2

Carlos hates hospital smell. 

He always has. Always will. There’s just something about the overcooked-food-smell mixed with the bleachy-antiseptic smell mixed with the stench of piss and shit and rot that you can't ever quite get out that turns his stomach. He’s been feeling queasy ever since he got here.

The dark-haired woman in the Tweety Bird scrubs has been asking a lot of questions - do they know either the man in the almost ironically ugly-ass vintage tracksuit or the woman with the defibrillator? did they see what happened? do they have any information that might help explain either of their conditions? - but Carlos has been letting Joaquin do all the talking. Joaquin’s that kind of guy, anyway. He’s always the first to volunteer for shit. He makes friends at the drop of a hat. People  _like_  him. 

“Is that lady okay?” he asks, and both Joaquin and the woman who’s probably a nurse or something look at him. Carlos is vaguely aware that he’s interrupted. He’s also vaguely aware that it’s a stupid question. The young woman had been upright and talking when they’d wheeled her in. The guy in the tracksuit had had a sheet over his face. But, Carlos figures, that means he already knows how the guy is. “She had a heart attack, right?”

“It looks like she went into cardiac arrest, yes,” the nurse or whatever says, in that special voice people use when they want you to notice how patient they’re being. “Did you see anything that might have triggered it? Was she acting unusual? Any blueness of the lips or extremities?”

Carlos shakes his head. He can’t stop staring in the direction of the hall they’d wheeled the young woman down. “No, nothing like that. She just...I’m pretty sure taught me piano when I was littler.”

Joaquin’s looking at him like he’s grown a second head. Carlos shoots him a warning look, mentally willing him not to mention in front of this nurse or whatever that neither of them have ever had piano lessons and that the closest Carlos has ever come to being musical is that time he taught himself to burp the alphabet song.

The nurse or whatever looks unconvinced, but after a moment watching Carlos, her pinched expression goes a little softer. “Look, I can’t give you any information about her condition if you aren’t family,” she says, “but she was in pretty good shape when she came in, and I can promise you that we will take very good care of her.”

Carlos nods, biting his bottom lip and squeezing his eyes shut. “I know, I know, it’s just - I worry about my aunt, especially since she didn’t tell us about her weak heart...” He tries squeezing out a tear or two by thinking about that time he was trying to show off to a food truck customer by squeezing a lime over her tacos while leaning over backwards and accidentally squeezed lime juice directly into his eye. 

Joaquin’s full-on staring at him now. Carlos wishes he was close enough to pointedly elbow in the ribs.

The nurse or whatever does not look more sympathetic. Actually, now she looks even more suspicious.

“She’s your aunt?” she asks. "I thought she was your childhood piano teacher. And isn’t she a little young?"

Carlos nods. “Well, the piano lessons were the only way she could keep in touch with us," he says, quickly. “It was so sad...when her boyfriend found out what she'd been doing...” He shakes his head, like he’s too overwhelmed with emotion to go on.

The nurse or whatever’s eyes narrow, her expression going flat. “Uh huh. Well, thanks for your help. I’ve got other patients to process, so if you’ll excuse me.” She doesn’t wait for either Carlos or Joaquin to say anything more, just turns and starts walking away.

“Did I mention she raised me from a very young age?” Carlos tries calling over the crowded waiting room. The nurse or whatever doesn’t turn around.

“You are so full of shit,” Joaquin says. “And we’re all damn lucky that you didn’t get picked that time you auditioned for Hamlet. That was the worst acting I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen The Room.”

“I was Oscar-worthy and you know it,” Carlos says, watching as the nurse or whatever kneels down to talk to a little girl with cornrows who’s clutching her stomach. 

“What is your deal, anyway?” Joaquin asks. “Why do you care so much about that girl? Who is she?”

Carlos blinks.

“I have no idea,” he says. 

Joaquin gives him the same look the nurse or whatever had given him just before she walked away.

“Seriously,  _amigo_ , I have no idea who she is,” Carlos says, finally turning back to Joaquin. “I’m pretty sure I know her from somewhere, but -”

“Hey, are you the guys with the dog?”

Joaquin’s face lights up, like it does any time anyone mentions Julia, and he brushes past Carlos to run up to the woman who’d asked. She’s got a folded-up bundle of black cloth under one arm, which Carlos is pretty sure is one of the cloaks that the four weirdos on the hill had been wearing, but otherwise she looks relatively normal, if a little basic. The black tank top and black yoga pants ensemble is overplayed, and pretty risky on someone obviously pushing thirty, though he has to admit the dark blue lipstick does kick it up a notch.

"You're the lady from the hill!" Joaquin says, beaming, at the same time as the woman's kohl-ringed eyes go wide.

"Fuck me, you’re -"

"Joaquin Terrero, from TV," Carlos interrupts, leaning on Joaquin's shoulder. "And I'm his much more attractive, witty, and fashionable older brother Carlos. I'm also available, so tell your good-looking, rich brothers and slash or older sons."

The woman snorts out a laugh, and Carlos frowns. "What?"

"Ignore him, he thinks he's hilarious," Joaquin says. "How're you doing? That whole thing was pretty scary. Though, I mean. I guess not compared to an invasion of shadow monsters from another reality."

The woman laughs again. "Hah, I was just coming over here to ask you the exact same thing! I gotta admit, I damn near shat my pants when that girl screamed, my first thought was that the Hunger was back somehow. You guys were closer, did you see anything?"

Joaquin shakes his head, and the woman makes a face.

“It’s just too weird,” she says. “I’m Liliana, by the way. Liliana Haight.”

“Joaquin Terrero,” Joaquin says. “But, uh, you knew that.” He laughs sheepishly, running a hand through his hair.

“And I’m Carlos, and now we’re all best friends. Let’s do drinks sometime,” Carlos says. He cranes his neck over his shoulder to glance back across the waiting room, but there’s no sign of that strangely familiar young woman. She must still be in with the doctors. And she probably will be for at least another hour, and Carlos  _doesn’t know her_. There’s no reason to hang around waiting.

“You don’t know either of those people who got hurt, do you?” Joaquin asks the woman - Liliana can’t be the name on her birth certificate, but then, it’s not like Carlos actually cares. “My brother thinks he knows the girl. Or maybe he’s just decided to stalk her, I’m not actually sure.”

“Stalking is tacky,” Carlos says, forcing himself to turn back to face Liliana. “What were you idiots doing up on that hill, anyway? It’s a pretty shitty place for a haunted house.”

Liliana’s easy smile fades into a troubled look, and she glances fleetingly down at the bundle under her arm before glaring up at Carlos. “Honestly? None of your damn beeswax.” She looks pointedly back to Joaquin. “And no, I didn’t know either of them. I’ve seen Tracksuit Guy around, he’s always there exercising when I’m driving home from work.”

She stops, with an expression like she’s just bitten into something unexpectedly sour, and says, “I guess I mean he  _was_  always there. Jesus. A guy just dropped dead not ten feet away from us for no reason this afternoon. This is like a damn Stephen King novel. I mean, one of the good ones.”

Carlos hums in acknowledgment, before stealing another glance back over his shoulder. It’d be really cool if he knew why he’s so worried about that girl. Maybe it’s just the fact that somebody did already die in front of him, almost close enough to touch, once today. He wants to make sure the girl’s gonna be all right, that she’s not just going to vanish right out from under him too, when he was right there and maybe could've done something. That the world’s gonna go on spinning just the same as it always has.

But that’s not quite it, or at least not all of it. There’s still that nagging feeling buzzing in the back of his brain that he  _knows_  her, that she’s important somehow. Carlos just can’t put his finger on why. The only time or place he can think that he might have ever even seen her before is in that same park, when he’s had to walk Joaquin’s stupid dog, and even then they couldn’t have said more than hellos to each other.

“Earth to Carlos?” Joaquin is saying, and Carlos blinks himself back to the present.

“Yeah, whatever,” he says. “You’re gonna be late for your shift at this rate.”

“It’s  _your_  shift, that’s why I made you come with to walk Julia, because the truck's downtown today and we walk right past it on the way home so you could head straight to work afterwards -”

“Oh yeah, and we have to get your dumb dog from the bike rack.” Carlos grins at Liliana, who's busy looking at the bundle in her arms like it’s a well-wrapped-up venomous snake, and starts walking. Enough bullshit. He’s not hanging around for any random old goth ladies or weird gut feelings. 

The automatic doors slide aside to let him out of the hospital, and a cold wind flutters the sides of his open jacket, carrying, for just a second, the thick, choking smell of smoke.

...

Rowan's car is parked two blocks away from the hospital, in the parking lot of a strip mall, outside of a beauty supply shop. Indigo took off on her bike half an hour ago and Storm wants to stop at the psychic shop and see if he can find anything on dealing with broken circles, so it's just Liliana and Rowan walking back to the car.

Liliana stops to pet the dog and say goodbye to Joaquin outside, which, again, Joaquin Terrero, hero of the Calamity, who she knew lived around here but never actually expected to run into, especially not like  _this,_  and god, he’s such an  _infant_ , and has a surprisingly not-terrible sense of humour for somebody who goes around saving people from monsters just because 'there was something I could do and it was the right thing to do it', oh yeah, Mr. Big Damn Hero, we've all seen the interview -

"Was that -" Rowan starts to ask, as Liliana joins him after giving Julia one last pat on the head.

"Yep," Liliana says.

"Isn't he -"

“Sure is.”

Rowan’s giving her an odd look, Liliana can tell. She speeds up, takes a couple bigger steps to get ahead of him, but with his longer legs he easily catches her up. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I would have loved to stop and talk to him! Maybe he has some idea of what’s going on -”

“Trust me, he doesn’t.” 

Rowan’s eyes narrow. “Liliana,” he says, in that deep, serious voice he only uses for casting circles and making Liliana feel bad about not being a Serious Enough Devotee Of The Goddess, “a man is dead. And we may have caused it. Don’t you think it’s  _important_  that we talk to the only person any of us know of who has actual, hands-on experience with...this kind of magic?”

“What, you mean the kind that actually works?” Liliana blurts, before she can stop her own mouth from moving.

Rowan looks like she just slapped him across the face. It’s hard to tell, with his dark complexion, when he’s blushing, but Liliana’s figured out the trick of it. His freckles get more pronounced.

“I mean the kind that clearly arrived here from somewhere  _else_ , “ he says, shortly. “Liliana...” He huffs out a breath, shakes his head, pulls his curls back from his face. “Seriously, why are you being such a dick?”

Liliana blinks. It’s always a little startling to hear Rowan swear. 

“I’m not being a dick,” she argues.

“You definitely, definitely are,” Rowan says, his voice heavy with disappointment. “You were a dick about doing the ceremony in the first place, you dicked around and ruined the circle on the hill,  _which_  may have had unimaginable consequences, and now you’re being a dick about trying to fix it. I must ask you: what is your damage?”

Liliana can feel her own face getting hot. She clears her throat into her fist, twisting the fabric of her cloak between two fingers.

“I just don’t think it was a great idea to start with,” she says, at last. “Summoning power from the plane of magic? It was never gonna work. And what were we gonna do with it, anyway? Magic Missile all our problems into oblivion? Distract ourselves with...pretty, sparkly magic fireworks? Sometimes the world is just shitty, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. Even if they’re magic.”

Rowan sniffs, and glances to his right, his brow furrowing. “Do you smell something burning?”

“Nope,” Liliana says. 

Rowan considers the sky for a moment longer, probably looking for smoke, before turning back to face Liliana with a nod.

“Well,” he says. “Thank you for being honest with me. And thank you for supporting our efforts despite your objections, though I wish you would’ve voiced them before we got to the point of casting the circle.”

“Got it,” Liliana mutters, her cheeks burning. She wishes she could just stuff her face into her cloak and not have to look Rowan in the eye.

Rowan nods again, like the conversation’s over and whatever he was worried about is all resolved, and they can just go straight back to talking like normal people again. Well, okay, normal people who believe in the healing powers of crystals and incense, but still. “I do think we should try to contact Joaquin Terrero and find out what he knows about interplanar magic. If there’s something we still need to do, some connection we may need to close, hopefully he will be able to help us.”

“Great,” Liliana mutters. “We’re taking advice from an eighteen-year-old. I bet he has some real good tips on how to win at beer pong.”

Rowan stares down at Liliana, his expression halfway between frustration and confusion.

“You’re supposed to be an  _adult_ ,” he says.

“I am one!” Liliana argues. “You can’t avoid it after you turn twenty-one!”

Rowan just rolls his eyes, but as he turns his head away, Liliana thinks she catches a glimpse of a smile.

...

It takes nearly an hour to get Marial’s medical records transferred from the heart clinic to the emerg, during which her implanted defibrillator beeps.  _Constantly_. By the time they actually get her records transferred and get ahold of the equipment to turn its alarm off, Marial is just about ready to light her own hair on fire. 

“Sorry about that,” the resident who’d checked her over says, sliding the curtain closed behind him. “We really weren’t prepared for this, for some reason your defibrillator was convinced that you were dead.”

Marial gestures down at herself. The resident looks up from the tablet he’s been looking over and smiles.

“Yeah, I don’t know either,” he says, reaching down and swiping something on the tablet’s screen. “You definitely don’t look dead to me. Actually, you look fine. I’d like you to check in with your cardiologist in the next week, just to make sure there aren’t any ill effects from the shock that device gave you when your heart stopped and see whether the medications you’re on are still appropriate for you, but I don’t see anything that should’ve caused this arrest, or might cause another one anytime soon.”

“Oh, good, I’m still a fascinating medical mystery,” Marial says, and smiles her biggest at the resident when his grin starts to look a little sad and desperate. “Don’t worry about me, I know the drill. So can I get out of here? No offense, but this place is freezing.”

The resident steps aside, sweeping the curtain out of the way as he gestures towards the desk.

Marial spends about another twenty minutes filling out the release paperwork and sorting out her insurance with the nurse at the reception desk before she actually gets out of the hospital, and then is faced with the prospect of a long, cold walk home with just her windbreaker between her and the elements, or paying for a taxi back home on top of the ambulance bill she’s going to have to shoulder. Unless the dead guy’s paying half of it. Who knows.

“Fucking September,” Marial mutters under her breath, zipping the windbreaker up and pulling the hood over her ears, tucking her chin down into the collar.

“Hey.”

Marial doesn’t realise at first that the person behind her is trying to get her attention. Their voice is - odd, a little whispery and echoey, and it’s hard to listen to. Not that it hurts her ears or anything, but it’s hard to tell if it’s actually a voice, or just the wind in the trees overhead or traffic in the next street over or something.

“Hey! You! Red hood!”

Marial turns around.

The dead guy’s standing there.

Marial just manages not to scream a second time. It’s definitely the dead guy, even though she can’t really make out any of his features - the neon tracksuit is unmistakable. 

Before she really knows what she’s looking at, though, the image is gone. Only the professional, brutalist grey concrete of the emergency centre wall stares back at Marial, giving nothing away. Leaning against that wall a few feet away, someone in a hospital gown and a hoodie glances over in Marial’s direction, and then, uninterestedly, glances away again.

Marial presses a hand against her heart, which is hammering out of time in her chest. Well, that’s just going to look  _great_  on her next checkup.

“Shit,” she mutters, under her breath, and then turns around, waving to hail a taxi.

...

Magnus is sparring with Carey - and losing, badly, she’s learned a new backflip-kick move that he’d get her to teach him if he wasn’t sure it’s only working for her because she’s a lot shorter and lighter than he is - when Killian pops her head out the back door and calls, “Hey, Magnus? Something in your house is burning.”

Magnus tries to scramble up, but the headlock Carey’s got him in is a little too complicated and they both end up in a heap on the grass, Johann running circles around them and excitedly barking every time either of them moves. 

By the time they get untangled and into the house, thick grey smoke is starting to seep out from under one of the doors at the end of the hall, skulking along the baseboards. The air is filled with a stench, like woodsmoke but more acrid, more bitter. It stings the back of Magnus’ throat, makes him cough. 

“Killian, get the dogs outside,” he says. “Carey, can you find me some water? I didn’t see any smoke from outside, maybe it’s still small enough we can put it out.”

“You got it,” Carey says, and she and Killian scatter.

Magnus rushes down the hall and throws the door open, only to be blasted in the face by a wall of smoke. It pricks at his eyes, tears making it impossible to see, and clogs his throat until he feels like there’s an iron band wrapped tight around his chest keeping him from taking a deep breath. The smell is terrible, sharp and sour, and nearly has him gagging.

It’s strange, though. With this much smoke, the whole room should be going up, but there’s no telltale orange glow of flames anywhere in the room, no blast of heat. What there  _is_  is a sound - a little like the crackle of flames, but softer, more like the quiet hiss and shush of sand pouring through fingers.

The longer Magnus listens, the more he thinks he can almost make out words.

“I brought water. Where’s the fire?” Carey’s voice says from somewhere above him, startling Magnus. He realises, dimly, that he’s stopped moving, that the thing spinning above him is the ceiling. “Magnus? Oh, shit! Killian! Help!”

It takes several minutes for them to haul Magnus out of the room and onto one of the couches. He isn’t sure how much time passes before he realises the smoke has vanished, that his house hasn’t burned to the ground, and that every inch of him hurts. 

“Augh,” he manages, and the sound grinds at the back of his throat. Magnus leans over and coughs until it feels like bits of his lungs are going to come flying out his mouth, and then lies back against the pillow that somebody kindly pushed under his head. “What...?”

“You’re okay!” Carey shouts, and suddenly her arms are around Magnus’ shoulders, careful not to throttle him. “You scared the hell out of me! You know, sometimes it’s okay to look  _before_  you rush in, big guy.”

Magnus tries to chuckle, but that hurts too. He’s spared having to ask about the dogs when Johann trots over and smears a big, wet, sloppy puppy kiss all over his face.

“What was on fire?” he asks, and that’s when Killian walks over and kneels down beside the couch, her face grave even for Killian.

“Nothing,” she says, and it takes a moment for Magnus to process what she’s saying. “There was no fire.”

She holds out a little velvet bag, and gently tips its contents out into her other hand. Magnus recognises it immediately.

“Hey, that’s -” He has to break off for another round of furious coughing before he can complete the sentence. “That’s that compact I found in Lucas’ lab, when that whole Crystal Kingdom shit was going down! I didn’t think I still had that!”

...

_“_ Did _I still have that? I thought you gave it to Justin.”  
_

_“Yeah, Griffin, and then you blew it up.”_

...

Killian, still looking grave, cracks the silver case open slightly. A puff of smoke rolls out, thick and ashy grey and stingingly bitter.

“It nearly killed you, Magnus,” she says, quietly, and Carey’s arms around Magnus’ shoulders (well, as far around as they’ll go) tighten. “You’re lucky we found it and closed it in time. Do you know of anybody who would try to curse you like this?”

“What?” Magnus shakes his head, careful not to dislodge Carey or Johann when he does. “No, that’s not - it’s not  _cursed_ , that assface Lucas was using it to steal ideas for inventions from another plane, I’ve had that thing for like a year and it’s never done anything like -” His voice goes, suddenly, and he coughs a few times more, clearing his throat as hard as he can.

Carey lifts one arm off Magnus’ chest and, very carefully, reaches out to brush a claw across the surface of the compact. She cracks it open, and one last puff of smoke gasps out as she pushes the two halves apart.

The silver of the upper half is tarnished almost black, shimmering blue as Carey twists it. And in the lower half of the compact, where there had been a smooth mirror of perfectly circular emerald, there is now a perfectly clear circle of crystal, split by a spiderweb of black-edged cracks.

Magnus stares at it for a moment.

“I think maybe we should talk to somebody about this,” he says. “Somebody who knows something about magic.”

...

_“Okay, don’t tweet us! Don’t tweet at us that Taako had the compact last, we figured it out!”_

_“Yeah, halfway through Griffin’s, uh, carefully-crafted scene. Hey Ditto, how much does this screw up your campaign?”  
_

_“Oh, it’s ruined. Totally off the rails. Balance II: 2 Fantasy 2 Furious is over before Dad even got a chance to talk. Hope you guys are proud of yourselves.”  
_

_“Well,_ technically _, Griffin, you were the one who -”  
_

_“Nope, the podcast is over now. Hey, I think it was...Justin’s turn to DM next?"_


	3. Chapter 3

The sun sets over the park.

As the light bleeds out of the sky, it bathes the world in red. The treetops, just beginning to turn, burn brilliant autumn colours in the low light, their shadows lying long and black and unnaturally stretched across the grass, striping it with darkness.

The shadow of the hill enfolds the place where, earlier that day, a man had died.

The sounds of traffic from the streets surrounding the park filter through the trees, but otherwise, the only sound is the soft soughing of the slightest of breezes through the tops of the trees. If you listen too long, it can start to sound like a voice.

In the grass, at the very top of the hill, a purple plastic gem glints in the last glorious rays of sunset. Behind it, in a perfect circle about six inches across, the grass is withered and yellow.

As the sun sinks, the circle of yellowed grass creeps, ever so slowly, almost imperceptibly, outwards. And for a moment, the still air around the hill smells faintly of smoke.

...

Usually, Liliana only lights incense out of habit, or because she likes the smell. Tonight, though, she mumbles a blessing she only remembers half the words to as she lights a stick of Full Moon and then, as an afterthought, every candle she owns. It’s not a small number.

Liliana’s never gone in much for actual witchcraft. Heck, she’s even on the fence about the Goddess the others seem to think is the biggest deal since Simon Cowell. But there’s definitely something in nature that’s more powerful and stranger than anything she can understand, and right now, she’s feeling pretty willing to try anything that might get her on its good side.

The room around her slowly fills with warm light and the soothing, thickly sweet smell of the incense. Liliana can feel the tension starting to bleed out of her shoulders as she sinks onto the couch, tucking her feet up beside her.

“What a fucking day,” she says, to the cat who jumps up beside her. Mavis opens her mouth and yawns agreement, her tiny sharp fangs snapping shut before she butts her head against Liliana’s ankle. Liliana leans over, gives Mavis a scritch behind the ears. “You ever accidentally kill a guy by dropping an el cheapo decorative knife almost on your own foot? Of course you haven’t, you’re a cat. You don’t even have opposable thumbs.”

Mavis  _prpt_ s in acknowledgment and twists her head into Liliana’s scratching fingers. Across the condo, there’s a series of whines, and then a scrabbling, clicking sound and a  _thunk_  as Mookie hurls himself headfirst at the baby gate keeping him locked in the kitchen.

Liliana huffs out half a laugh, pushing herself up off the couch. “All right, all right, little guy,” she says, padding over to the kitchen entryway to give the labradoodle a pat. Mookie nearly loses his mind when he sees her smiling over the gate, barking wildly and then spinning around in smaller and smaller circles until he trips over his own two hind legs and falls over in a heap. He looks up at Liliana, panting happily, and she can’t help but laugh.

“Yeah, you’re a good boy,” she says, leaning over to give him a good scratch on the neck. Mookie’s eyes slide closed, his tongue hanging out of his mouth in sheer, canine joy as Liliana ruffles the fur under his collar. “You’re my very best boy. And if I let you in here with the candles you and the condo would both be on fire in a microsecond.”

The hiss starts quiet, almost too quiet for her to notice, but it grows. Liliana turns around, opening her mouth to tell Mavis to wait her turn, she’ll get more ear scritches, but stops.

Mavis’ ears are back, one paw up and batting at the air with a fistful of needle claws, her mouth wide and lips curled back to show off her teeth as she hisses at - nothing. A patch of shadow in the corner, over the shelf with the succulents and Liliana's resin dragon-and-fairy figurine collection (not to be mistaken for the resin fairy figurine collection or the resin dragon figurine collection, which are scattered all around the condo). Where Liliana hadn’t lit any candles.

On an ordinary day, Liliana might chalk it up to Mavis being stir-crazy and try to find her mouse on a string where she’d almost definitely batted it under the couch. Today, though, Liliana takes one look at that patch of darker shadow, and nearly trips over her own feet running over to scoop Mavis up off the couch, ignoring the chunk Mavis takes out of her arm as she backs away towards the kitchen.

“I gotta warn you,” she calls, feeling equal parts ridiculous and terrified, Mavis spitting and squirming in her arms, “I’m a very powerful witch! And I’m not scared to whip up some magic and go all Joaquin on your ass!”

The shadow hangs in the corner, like shadows generally do.

“Shoo!” Liliana shouts. “In the name of the Goddess I banish thee! Scat!”

The shadow doesn’t shift, doesn’t grow lighter, doesn’t actually change at all. But Liliana could swear she hears something, just on the edge of hearing - a soft, resigned sigh, and a dry whispering, like dead leaves rubbing against each other, or fabric rustling.

Mavis chills the fuck out, flopping forward in Liliana’s arms. Behind her, Mookie lets out a confused whine.

Liliana lets out a long breath of her own, finally realising that the warmth on her arm is blood dripping from the checkerboard of scratches Mavis decorated her forearm with.

“Shit,” she mutters, dropping the cat to the floor. Mavis makes a little indignant sound and stalks over to the couch, flopping down right in the middle of it with a little cat huff and a floof of dark fur.

...

Rowan briefly looks up from the Book of Shadows when a shadow flickers across the light from his desk lamp. Seeing nothing that might have cast it, he snaps the book closed and heads over to the kitchen. Moments later, his apartment is filled with the smell of burning sage.

The shadow moves on.

...

Indigo is changing the set for her insulin pump when the kitchen lights all flicker, then dim, like a brownout. She very carefully finishes placing her set on her thigh, tucks the cord under her skirt and up through her waistband, and clips the pump in place onto the skirt's waistband before reaching for the salt shaker sitting on the table beside her.

The lights return to normal. Indigo stands for a moment anyway, with the salt shaker at the ready, before concluding that whatever just happened is over.

Her hands shake only slightly as she grabs her phone.

...

Storm is lying on his bed, blankly rewatching the raw footage for the next video in his most recent Let's Play, when his phone lights up and buzzes itself nearly off the bed beside him, throwing an eerie blue light onto the stippled popcorn ceiling above his head.

For the briefest of instants, a shadowy figure is visible there, haloed in the blue light.

Storm grabs his phone, reads Indigo's warning, and taps out a few characters, a string of emojis that would mean nothing to anyone not already familiar with banishing charms. He fires them back at Indigo.

The bedroom's darkness loses some of its inexplicable menace. The shadow is gone. Storm is, once more, alone.

...

Joaquin's shift ends late. Well, actually,  _Carlos_ ' shift ends late. But it's Joaquin who's left to lock up the truck and trundle it home in the gathering dark. Which just figures, honestly. That jerk just needs to get a different job if he really hates working at the food truck so much. Or at least start letting Joaquin know ahead of time if he has to skip a shift! Joaquin gets it, shit happens, and honestly he didn't feel much like going to work after this afternoon either, but he's beyond sick of this.

He does kind of get why Carlos keeps coming back to work at the food truck, though. Joaquin'd really have liked to apply for a game design internship this summer, but - it's not like you can just look your dad in the eye and say 'I'm gonna let your dream fall apart so I can go after mine'. Especially not when school's so expensive to start with, and you really need that summer job, and the truck has to be open as many hours as possible to make enough to pay for all the repairs after Joaquin and Taako accidentally blew it up, and...

On the other hand, if their dad ever actually tasted Carlos' cooking, he'd probably kick him out of the truck himself. Joaquin loves his bro, really does, but he's never met anybody else who can make authentic street food that's less appealing than Taco Bell. Maybe if he spent less time showing off and more on the actual food - 

Joaquin shakes his head, and slams the utensil drawer.

The streets are weirdly empty tonight, and the setting sun casts long, creeping shadows from the buildings across the cracked asphalt. The sunset through the haze drips bloody down the tall glass buildings of downtown. Joaquin slides the metal shutter closed over the order window with an uneasy feeling he can’t quite put his finger on. It might just be the changing wind - autumn’s sweeping in with a rattle of dead leaves - but he can’t shake the jittery feeling that he should be preparing for something. That something big’s coming.

He glances back over his shoulder once, as he’s climbing up into the cab, and that’s when he sees it. Stretched out along the middle of the street, stark in the red light, is the shadow of a person.

But there’s no one there to cast it.

Joaquin throws himself into the driver’s seat, and slams the door behind him, breathing hard. He glances back behind him again, but the shadow is gone.

...

Marial shuts down her laptop and blinks in the sudden dark. 

When the afterimages start to clear, she squeezes her eyes shut and flicks on her desk lamp, wincing at the light leaking through her eyelids. She’s really stayed up too late this time, but she managed to hack through a thousand words of essay and she’s actually starting to see the shape of what she’s trying to say, now. 

It’s definitely time for bed, though, or she’s going to be a zombie in the morning. Well, more of a zombie than she already technically is. One day maybe she’ll get tired of making jokes about how she’s (very, very technically) already come back from the dead once, but today is not that day.

...tonight? Does two AM count as day or night, anyway?

Marial sighs, decides she’s given her eyes long enough to adjust to the ambient light, and opens them. 

The dead guy is sitting on her desk.

Marial doesn’t scream. She smacks both hands over her mouth, swallowing down the shriek that threatens to spill out. Everyone else on the floor is asleep - okay, every other  _sane,_ organized person on the floor is asleep - and if she screams and wakes them up, she’s not going to have a lot of friends around here. 

By the time she swallows down her shout, though, the dead guy is already gone, the neon of his tracksuit fading into the afterimages still flashing when Marial blinks. Dimly, she thinks she hears a voice, whispery and faint just on the edge of hearing, mutter, “Shit.”

It’s two in the morning and the world doesn’t feel quite real anyway. It’s two in the morning and the poltergeists in those shitty ‘inspired by true events’ movies never vanish and mutter ‘shit’ when the protagonist opens their eyes to see them inches away. It’s two in the morning and nothing makes a lick of goddamn sense and a guy just died in front of her this afternoon for no apparent reason and Marial’s pretty sure she almost died too and why the fuck not.

“Hello?” she asks the empty air above her laptop and a little to the right. “Hey, are you a ghost? Is there some Beetlejuice shit going on up in here?”

The only response is the whirr of her computer’s fan suddenly clicking off, the light that shows it’s charging coming on with a sudden burst of blue.

“Look, this is twice now,” Marial says, sounding bolder than she feels. She pushes her chair out from the desk and stands, slowly, still half-expecting some burn-scarred claw-handed freakazoid to pop out of nowhere and start making terrible puns at her. The dorm stays still and silent. “If you’re trying to get my attention, could you like leave a note or something, instead of popping up right in front of me? I’m trying to  _not_  have another heart attack.”

The silence is deafening.

Marial turns in a slow circle, in case the dead guy has popped up behind her while she’s been talking, but there’s no sign of ugly 80s neon. “Is that what this is about?” she asks the thin air, the shadows that cling to the corners of the room. “Some Final Destination baloney or something? Are you here to reap my ass? Because I gotta tell you, if that’s what you’re here for, you better get used to disappointment, because I’m not going fucking anywhere until I get my degree!”

She realises too late that her voice has been rising. She’s almost yelling. 

There’s still no sound and no movement in her room.

“Fuck it,” Marial mutters under her breath, and throws the door open. The kitchenette is just on the other side of the shared living space. To get there, she has to walk past the dead guy sitting on the couch. “Oh, fuck off! That’s it, tomorrow I’m getting some sage.”

The dead guy blinks out of existence as soon as she opens the door, with a sound that, if she didn’t know it was probably coming from a ghost, Marial would call a frustrated huff.

“Yeah, and don’t come back!” Marial says, and one of the other three doors leading into the common area creaks open, Sylvie’s head poking out around it with an accusing glare.

“Who the  _fuck_  are you yelling at at two in the  _fucking_  morning,” Sylvie demands.

Marial blinks.

“I have no idea,” she admits. 

Sylvie’s glare narrows. 

“Go to bed,” she snaps, before yanking her head back into her room and slamming the door behind her.

Marial sighs, running a hand through her hair as she pads barefoot over to the kitchenette and rummages in the spice cabinet until she finds the salt shaker. 

The line of salt she draws across the threshold and the windowsill of her bedroom doesn’t actually make her feel any safer, but she pretends it does anyway as she bundles into bed. It takes everything in her not to pull the covers up over her head.

...

Refuge is somehow both exactly and not at all as Lucretia pictured it. 

There’s something ironically fitting about her coming here, to a place with a name that means ‘a place to shelter’. A place to hide. 

Not that she’s hiding. There isn’t a single person at the Bureau of Benevolence who doesn’t know exactly where Lucretia is. But - her friends, her  _family_ , have gone their separate ways, finally settling into their lives on this plane as they never truly did under the influence of the voidfish. 

They’re finally making this place their home.

And Lucretia? She can’t stand another moment hovering in the skies above this world, making decisions about how best to help its people,  _save_  its people, without being part of it. She needs her feet on the ground, for once. She needs to touch this world that she helped save, that she’s helping to build.

Maybe, if she’s lucky, she’ll find a place there for herself. One that isn’t so remote. So distant.

There are all kinds of reasons to start here, in this town that time forgot, and no reasons at all. But something that Merle had mentioned when the boys had told her about how they’d reclaimed the Chalice has wedged itself sideways in Lucretia’s mind. And now, a little over a year since the Hunger’s defeat, she’s finally starting to feel like she can breathe again. Like the world won’t fall to pieces if she isn’t up there watching over it, stitching it haphazardly back together. 

Lucretia finds her old travelling clothes packed neatly in her trunk from the Starblaster, too worn and utilitarian for Madame Director to be caught dead in. They don’t quite fit the same as she remembers - though it’s been so long, she lost so many years to Wonderland and to her own stubbornness, can she really be surprised?

Her old red robe is stuffed in the bottom of the trunk. She pulls the red cloak free from the trunk and holds it out in front of her, at arm’s length, for just a moment too long.

Then she folds it carefully and returns it to the trunk where she found it.

She packs a bag, and takes her staff (no magic within it now but what she channels through it, though any vagabond who thinks that makes six feet of solid oak harmless will quickly learn their mistake), and gives Avi the coordinates, and for the first time since the moonbase was created, she rides a cannonball down to Faerun. 

And that's how Lucretia finds herself standing in front of the sign welcoming her to the mining town of Refuge. It's changed some from what the boys had described, she notes, with a flicker of pride - the sign now bears the legend BY THEIR SACRIFICE WE ARE MADE FREE.

She stops only long enough to pay her respects to Mayor Cassidy before making her way to the place she came to see. One of the brothers is sweeping red dirt from the steps of the temple when she approaches. He looks up as Lucretia climbs the steps, and smiles.

The temple doors swing open under her touch.

The light inside the temple is...different, somehow. Softer, paler, and yet also brighter, making it hard to see. When Lucretia looks out the windows that line the temple's main room, all she can see is a perfect, even white.

The woman seated on the altar at the far end of the room looks up as Lucretia approaches, brushing long, silvery hair back behind her ear and laying the knitting she'd been working on down into her lap. Lucretia draws herself up to her full height as she reaches the altar, holds her shoulders back and her head high.

"Lady Istus," she says, and the woman seated on the altar smiles.

"Lucretia," she says in response. "I wondered if I'd be seeing you. Won't you sit down?"

...

_"I have a question."_

_"Yeah Dad, shoot."_

_"When does Magn- no, Merle. When does Merle get to play?"_

_"Well, because you just asked that question, probably - probably in the next mini-arc."_


	4. Chapter 4

Angus McDonald adjusts his spectacles on his nose, and gives the circle of clear, cracked crystal a cautious tap with the glowy star stuck to the end of his wand.

There’s a short, sharp shower of sparks, a sizzle, and Angus jumps backwards, his eyebrows smoking. He reaches up and cautiously pats out one ember that’s still smouldering in his dark curls.

“Well, that’s - that’s not good, sir,” he says.

“Yeah, I kind of figured that one out,” Magnus says. “Do you know what it is?”

Angus peers at the compact.

"Looks like smoky quartz, sir," he says. "You said you found this in Lucas Miller's lab?"

"Yeah, but it was an emerald when I found it." Magnus watches as Angus' eyebrows shoot up, that spark of interest that means he's found a mystery and won't stop until he's solved it creeping into his curious expression. "Does smoky quartz usually, like, literally smoke? Smoke that's full of creepy whispers?"

Angus takes the compact from Magnus' hand, gingerly, like he's afraid it might bite, and adjusts his spectacles again. "No, that's not a known property of smoky quartz. This is - it's very interesting, sir! Taako said Lucas was transmuting circles of other materials into these gemstone mirrors, but it's been more than a year since you guys destroyed the Grand Relics and reunited the Light of Creation, if it was going to revert you'd think it would have already done it by now -"

"Speaking of Taako," a familiar voice drawls from the doorway.

"Taako!" Magnus shouts, bounding over to scoop his old friend, who’s leaning against the doorway in a carefully casual pose, up into an enormous bear hug. Taako makes a strangled noise as he's hoisted into the air.

"No, put me down! Put me _down_ , you oversized - you...giant gorilla man.”

Taako tolerates the hug for a few moments more, before struggling his way out of Magnus’ grip. He lands on his feet, like a cat, fussing with his multiple enormous scarves indignantly and deliberately not looking at Magnus. 

“So,” he says, holding out one arm, facing away from Magnus, and examining his glittery nail polish. “The student becomes the master, huh? Ango McDango, protégé mine. Mind telling me when you and the Hammer here got so tight?”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir!” Angus chirps. “Would you take a look at this, sir? It’s a kind of magic I’ve never seen before, sir!”

“Yeah, yeah, your ass-kissing is noted,” Taako says, spinning to glare Magnus down. “But that doesn’t change the fact that one of my oldest friends decided that he’d rather ask you about a cool magic thing than _me_. _Taako_. The _wizard_?”

“Yeah, we replaced you with a younger, more adorable model,” Magnus says. He reaches out and steals Angus’ cap off his head, giving Angus’ curls a ruffle. “Thanks, little man.”

“Okay, well, first off, good luck finding anybody more adorable than me,” Taako says, flipping one scarf back over his shoulder. “Second, good _luck_  replacing all this, uh, uh, this raw magical talent, knowledge, and experience.” He darts a hand out, palm up, gesturing towards Angus without looking. “Hand it over, Ango m’boy, let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

...

Some therapists have framed Rorschach blots on their walls. Some therapists have soothing watercolours. Delia Shelley has a John Tenniel illustration framed and hanging beside her license to practice and her diploma. It’s in colour, a pink-dress-clad Alice taking tea with the Mad Hatter and March Hare. A plaque in the mat surrounding the illustration says, in discreet, elegant gold calligraphy, “We’re All Mad Here”.

The first time Storm saw it, he thought it was in vaguely poor taste. 

Now that he’d gotten to know Delia and her sense of humour, he can see why she keeps it there, but there’s still something about it that makes him just a little uneasy. He’s sure there are people who’ve had one initial appointment with her and never come back due to that illustration. He was almost one of them. 

It’s just that Delia’s such a good therapist. She’s really good at finding the sore spots, picking his insecurities apart, getting to the root of the issue. Storm’s learned a whole lot about himself since he started coming to see her, and - he wouldn’t exactly say he’s _better_ , but he’s definitely less worse.

And, of course, there’s Delia herself. She can take a little getting used to. Starting with the 80s shoulderpads and enormous hair. Today, her blazer is lime green, with hot pink piping along the lapels, and she’s wearing a lipstick-pink skirt and lightning-bolt earrings with it. Storm hasn’t been able to figure out yet whether she dresses up to try to look bright and fun and ‘hip’ for an audience of students, or if she genuinely just likes to look like an eighties workout video threw up all over a clown. 

“So, how’ve you been since our last visit?” Delia asks, tapping her pen gently against the notepad resting on her knee. Since he’s been coming here, Storm’s seen her make notes in it exactly once. He’s pretty sure it’s a sort of security blanket.

He shrugs one shoulder. “Fine.”

Delia tilts her head to one side, her smile turning knowing. “Does that stand for Fucked Up, Insecure, Neurotic, and -”

“No, I mean...” Storm takes a breath, considering his words. “I’ve been better, but at least I’m stable.” He grips his knees, blows out the breath. “It’s hard to tell lately what’s my brain chemistry and what’s just my news feed.”

Delia nods, and throws in an eye roll. “Wonderful old world we live in, ain’t it.” 

Storm huffs out half a laugh.

“Is that why you asked to see me again so soon?” Delia asks, uncrossing and crossing her legs. The notebook gets set down beside her, within easy reach but out of sight. “Your news feed?”

Storm shakes his head. “No, no, I’m dealing with it. No, there was...something strange happened yesterday, and I just wanted to...” 

He stops. Delia leans towards him a little. “Storm?”

“It’s all right, it’s just a little difficult to think how to -” Storm leans back against the chair’s low back, runs a hand through his hair. “I saw a man die yesterday.”

Delia’s perfectly-arched eyebrows shoot towards her hairline.

“Go on,” she says.

...

Now, for just a second here, we go back to that hill in that park. The wind is up, really tossing those treetops around, and that circle of dead grass is really obvious now. In fact, just looking at it, it seems to be bigger than the last time we saw it. And it's getting bigger still.

The outside edge of the circle creeps forward, inching towards this little purple plastic gem that's lying in the grass. As soon as it hits the gem, there's a flash, like a whole bunch of sparklers going off at once, and then -

...

_"So just - just let me get this straight - that was one of those patented Griffin McElroy's Beautiful Ass Monologues, huh? That's what -"_

_"Now, Justin, in fairness, I think it's pronounced 'beautiful-ass' -"_

_"- that's what everybody's horny for?"_

_"All right, Juice, let's hear all the different, original_   _ways_ you _would describe the top of a grassy hill. It's gotta be at least three."_

_"I'm just saying -"_

_"No, Justin, now I want to hear it."_

_"- it's not your best work, Ditto. Not your finest craftsmanship."_

_"Three exciting, beautiful, original descriptions of the top of a fuckin' hill, Justin. I wanna hear them, Justin. Right now, Justin. Right off the top of your -"_

_"Okay. Okay, Griffin, you know what?"_

_"No I don't know, Juice, what?"_

_"I'll take your fuckin' challenge."_

_"All right, then let's hear it."_

_"..."_

_"..."_

_"You know, I really thought you boys would do more with 'Griffin McElroy's Beautiful Ass Monologues'."_

_"Shut up, Dad, I'm trying to be creative."_

...

And then, we see the inside of a roller derby arena.

The rink is deafening with the clatter of wheels against wood. It's almost drowning out the yelling, although as people notice what's going on and stop to look, the clatter's dying down. A small crowd's gathering at one end of the rink, all staring up at the ceiling.

And at the girl suspended in midair just below it.

"Just hang on, Jill, we'll get you down!" a much smaller girl almost directly under her shouts, hopping up and down like that will get her all the way up to the ceiling of the arena.

"How!?" the girl suspended in the air yells back down, flailing her arms and legs with no apparent results. "I don't even know how I got up here!"

Another girl crosses her arms over the logo on her jersey. "Have you tried thinking happy thoughts?"

...

"Well, that's weird," Taako says, sitting back and eyeing the compact distrustfully. 

"Yeah. The whole situation's weird," Magnus agrees. "Especially since I'm pretty sure you had the compact last? I don't know how it managed to get into my storage room."

Taako waves a hand dismissively. "No, that's not what I meant. I'm talking about - well, Ango, since you're apparently the go-to wizarding expert now, what'm I talking about?"

Angus adjusts his spectacles again, surveying the compact from several angles, raising his hands to form a square to frame it. Magnus is pretty sure he's just using detect magic, but it sure looks impressive.

"That's very odd, sir!" he says, finally, lowering his hands. "You'd expect to find transmutation magic around an artifact like this, but that's not - it's there, sirs, but it's very old and faint! I don't think this was done with transmutation magic, sirs!"

"Yeah, yeah, you made a basic deduction, whoop dee do," Taako yawns. "Enough about what isn't there. What _is_ there, Angus?"

Angus McDonald frowns. It isn't a frown of confusion, or upset about Taako's teasing. It's a frown that says that something is off its axis and Angus isn't sure he can make it right, and it makes him look, very suddenly, a whole lot older.

"Necrotic energy, sirs," he says.

Taako shoots Magnus a pointed glance. It blunts itself on Magnus.

"Wait, isn't that necromancy stuff?" he says. "What's it got to do with that asshole Lucas - well, okay, when I put it like that..."

"Got it in one, bubbeleh," Taako says. "And that smoke. Weird smoke, necromancy...remind you of anything?"

It's Magnus' turn to frown. Angus looks from Taako to Magnus, obviously trying to interpret the tense silence.

"Is this about Wonderland?" he asks, quietly, and Magnus doesn't miss the way Taako flinches. He's sure he flinches too.

"World's greatest smartass detective," Taako mutters under his breath, reaching out and turning one of the coasters on the table into an oversized chocolate chip cookie, which he immediately takes a large, angry bite out of. The face he makes says, loud and clear, that it doesn't taste anywhere near as good as a chocolate chip cookie baked the conventional way, but that that's not going to stop him from finishing it.

"We should tell your sister. And Barry," Magnus says. "They should know about this."

"Oh, yeah," Taako says, spewing crumbs, and swallows hard. "Can't wait to see their faces when you tell 'em that your, uh, that you found a rock that's a lich."

"There's a lich hiding on the Plane of Thought," Angus breathes, looking at the compact with his eyes alight. "Oh wow, that's very clever! I bet the Raven Queen's emissaries would never think to look there, it's not supposed to have magic! I wonder if they got the idea from you, sirs!" He beams up at Magnus and Taako. Even though he's not the one eating a cookie made out of a cardboard coaster, Magnus still feels a little sick to his stomach.

"Chyup," Taako says, stuffing the last of the cookie into his mouth and dusting off his hands. "Looks like it's time to call in the big guns."

...

We see a forest, thick, dark pine trees rising like columns holding up the distant arch of the sky. There’s a dirt road cutting through the trees, winding around and switching back in on itself, slowly coiling its way up the mountain. And on that road, there’s an old, wood-panelled hatchback sedan with a snowboard and a pair of skis strapped to the roof rack.

We see, through the windshield, two young human men, one with hair cropped close to his scalp and one with hair hanging limply in his eyes, both singing along to the radio. The young man with the short hair drums, badly, on the steering wheel, while his companion rolls the passenger-side window down and pulls out a lighter and a hand-rolled blunt. He clicks the lighter once, twice, but it doesn’t catch.

Squinting through his hair, he gives it one more click.

The fireball lifts the roof off the car, spraying sparks and bits of charred snowboard flying into the trees. Along either side of the ribbon of dirt road, the forest kindles.

...

_"Now_ that's _a Beautiful Ass Monologue."_

_"Well, that's funny. I don't remember there being any asses in it."_

_"Daaaaad."_

_"Low-hanging fruit."_

_"And you call yourself our father!"_

...

The goddess turns her attention back to her knitting, gesturing to one of the pews in front of her. Lucretia remains standing, back rigid, staff clutched white-knuckled in both hands until she fears the oak might splinter under her fingers. She’s not here to worship.

Istus glances up, and half-smiles when she sees Lucretia still standing.

“You want to know if it was all worth it,” she says, kindly, and Lucretia interrupts.

“No. Not _worth it_. We saved the world. We saved every world.” She states it as simple fact, because it is. They _did_  save the world. Her voice only wavers on the last question. “Was it all necessary?”

“Necessary,” Istus repeats thoughtfully, her knitting needles _clik-clik_ ing against each other as her hands fly. An intricate pattern of stitches takes shape under her fingers. Lucretia has to wrench her eyes away, force herself to focus on the goddess’ face. It’s a friendly, lovely face, beautiful in a warm, inviting way. Even while looking directly at her, Lucretia can’t seem to make out Istus’ eyes.

“All the suffering, the worlds destroyed, the lives lost, the wars -” She stops herself. But still, the image of Taako’s face over the business end of the Umbra Staff, counting down; the horror in Davenport’s voice as he’d asked her what she’d done - “Was that fate?”

Istus just holds her gaze. _Clik clik clik_  go her needles, a steady rhythm, almost comforting.

Lucretia gives herself a mental shake. 

“Magnus told me about meeting you here. About how you -” She almost says _interfered_. “Intervened when the Hunger arrived. Was this your plan all along?” she asks, a little more sharply than she’d intended. It’s not that she resents Istus’ attempts - or ability - to put her at ease, so much as she doesn’t trust it. There have been many, many times in Lucretia’s unnaturally long life when it would have been easy for her to let go, to do what seemed natural, to give in.

And if she had, everything would have been lost. 

“Is this how it had to be, to stop the Hunger? All this pain?  _Was it necessary_?”

For a moment, Istus doesn’t speak, turning her focus back to her knitting. The clatter of her needles, the quick movement of her fingers, is almost hypnotic. Lucretia shuts her eyes.

“You each made choices,” Istus says, at last. 

“Did they matter?” Lucretia spits. Istus looks up again, catching her gaze and holding it. Even as she looks directly into those eyes, Lucretia can’t recall what they look like.

“They meant the world,” Istus says, softly.

Lucretia exhales, slow and shaky. Her deathgrip on her staff doesn’t shift, but she leans forward, slightly, letting six feet of heavy oak take some of her weight.

It’s been so long. She’s borne it all herself for such a long time.

“Then I could have chosen better,” she says, under her breath, almost without realising the words have left her thoughts. She’s not certain if it’s a relief or another weight slung around her neck.

There’s a huff of air, and Lucretia looks up to see Istus obviously trying to bite back another laugh. 

“Look, if you ask me, at this point you can just take the win,” Istus says. She holds up her knitting, so that Lucretia can see the subtle shift in the pattern, from tight, tiny cabling to large, loose, soft-looking scallops. “Every decision you made, every step you took, has brought you to -”

It’s probably rude to interrupt a goddess, but Lucretia points with the tip of her staff towards the elaborate scarf Istus is holding up, right at the hard line where the black stops and the scarf turns into a riot of colour.

“Is that supposed to be smoking?”

Istus looks down, just as the scarf erupts into flame.

“Oh, ___________,” Istus says. The word dissolves into static in Lucretia’s ears - not like voidfish static, more like the sound of something that can’t quite be comprehended with mortal ears. She’s still very sure, somehow, that it’s a dirty word. 

It’s not a very large flame, but it is rapidly eating a hole in the scarf, and filling the bright, airy temple with thick, choking, bitter grey smoke. 

Istus rises from her seat with inhuman grace, and then throws the scarf on the floor and stamps on it, hiking up her skirts to keep them from catching on fire as she stomps one foot up and down. It doesn't seem to be having any effect. Lucretia debates with herself for a moment, but the smoke is growing so thick that she can no longer see the ceiling overhead. She points her staff, and as Istus raises her foot for another stamp, casts a bubble of protection around the little flame, cutting off its air.

Finally, the flames die out with a hiss that almost sounds like a human voice, leaving the scarf hanging together by two or three stitches and an enormous hole lined with grey ash in its middle.

Istus raises it to eye level, looking through the hole so that it frames her face, and says, “Well, _that_  wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Lucretia presses her lips together, but she can’t keep her shoulders from shaking, just once, with a burst of laughter.

...

We see a drivethrough lineup, packed solid, car horns blaring. None of the cars are moving, though, all of them backed up from the pickup window.

The reason for the bottleneck is instantly obvious when we look through the pickup window and see several people in what we recognise as Taco Bell uniforms, running around the restaurant kitchen chasing a sheep. Which is also wearing a Taco Bell uniform. And a headset.

...

Marial’s newsfeed is suddenly full of stupid National Enquirer stories. In between all the unfortunately, depressingly real bad news, she scrolls past people turning into potted plants, aging or de-aging years in an instant, suddenly emitting a light so bright that it blinds everyone in a five-foot radius. Every once in a while one or two of these will slip past her filters, she knows, but this is...a lot. And when she checks the sources - yeah, that one really looks like it’s from the Washington Post. And that one could easily be mistaken for the New York Times. If these are spoof sites, they're  _good_  spoof sites. And if it's some kind of prank or protest about fake news, then it's _hilarious_.

Sighing, Marial puts down her phone, reaching for the textbook beside her. Just as her hand lands on the cover, a hand reaches out and covers hers. It’s ice cold, and she can see the bones through it. Not like the hand is skinny or has poor circulation. Like someone’s dipped Marial’s hand in a freezer. Like the skin is translucent, nearly completely transparent, each yellow-white bone clearly visible through it. 

Marial looks up.

The dead guy flashes a crooked smile at her.

“Hi,” he says, in a voice that’s half-solid, half-whisper. “Can we talk?”


	5. Chapter 5

The dead guy looks at Marial.

Marial looks at the dead guy.

He doesn't seem to be quite...there. There's something about his features that's indistinct, difficult to see. Like his skin and his face are just images on a heat-vision camera, red and yellow splotches shading to white in the general shape of a person. She can see what looks like an x-ray of his bones through it, shifting and changing opacity every time he moves. She can also see the glowing red of the EXIT sign over the library door through his forehead. His ugly neon tracksuit is the only part of him that seems semi-solid.

"You're dead," Marial says, because that's a great conversational gambit to open with. A couple of the international students at the next table glance up from their books to give her a dirty look, and Marial picks her phone back up, swiping across it with her thumb and then holding it to her ear like she's getting a call. "Hey, you're dead. I remember, I was there."

"I...think so, yeah," the dead guy says. "Can we go back and try this one again? Hi, I'm Gary."

"I'm assuming nobody else can see you," Marial says, into her phone, "because usually that's how these things go."

"You're an astute observer," the dead guy - Gary - says. "No, nobody can see me but you, for some reason. Trust me, I've tried." His features stay indistinct, but Marial's pretty sure that the little flicker of red lightning at his temples is frustration.

"Probably because I've died too," Marial says, and then realises she'd said it out loud. "Uh, hi. I'm Marial. I also notice you're not pulling a disappearing act this time."

"That, uh, wasn't intentional," Dead Guy Gary says, sounding sheepish.

"Really? I feel like popping up for just long enough to get a good jumpscare in and then vanishing again so I can't be sure it was real had to have been pretty damn intentional."

Dead Guy Gary shifts uncomfortably, and Marial wonders if he can actually feel uncomfortable, or if it's just a leftover mannerism from when he had a body. "Turns out it takes energy to be seen when you're dead. I'm sorry about the jumpscares," he adds, sounding worried, and bobs his head a little anxiously. Despite his frankly terrifying whole business, Marial finds it oddly sweet.

"Okay," Marial says, drumming her fingers against the table between them. "So it takes energy to be seen. What, you suddenly came into a whole bunch more energy? Did you haunt somebody until you levelled up?"

"I have a theory," Dead Guy Gary says. "How much do you know about Dungeons and Dragons?"

...

Lucretia returns to the moonbase with her thoughts whirling.

She'd been rather unceremoniously hustled out of the Temple of Istus after the incident with the flaming scarf, the goddess proclaiming that she 'needed to make some calls'. When Lucretia had turned around to storm back in, the temple had been filled with completely ordinary light and empty, the only sign of the vision she'd met the faint smell of bitter smoke still hanging in the air. She'd stayed the night in Refuge, hoping for another audience with the goddess, but no such luck. Fate, it appears, will do exactly as she pleases. 

There's something Istus had said after the flaming scarf incident, though, that's looping through Lucretia's thoughts, refusing to rest.

_"That wasn't one of mine. That's something from outside. Like you."_

_Wasn't one of mine._ Lucretia's never been particularly religious, and though she's heard everything Merle has to say on the subject of Pan twice over, there's still a lot she doesn't understand about gods. But she'd always had a vague understanding that they were - eternal. Omniscient. Ever-present. Merle had certainly made it seem that way, anyway. Even in their travels, even when they'd found themselves in planar systems beyond their own, that faith has always been constant. Pan had always been there for Merle, for them, no matter how far from home they'd traveled, no matter how new and strange the world.

Lucretia had always somehow assumed that applied to all the gods. 

To hear - from Istus' own mouth - that that's not true? That Fate - at least, that _this_ Fate - had not predestined all their suffering in the name of the greater good? That they were more than pawns in a cosmic chess game? That nothing forced them into the roles they play but their own choices? It seems impossible, and yet - they'd certainly outrun the Raven Queen, a hundred times over.

There's no Fate to make them suffer any more. There's no Fate to fight against, no Fate to thwart Lucretia's efforts to be anything other than a necessary evil. There's only her, and what she did, and the consequences.

She's still not sure if that's better or worse. But - at least it means she has a chance.

It's this storm of thoughts that circles Lucretia's head as she disembarks from the cannonball back on the moonbase, that distracts her when Avi asks how her trip was. Which is why his question startles her so badly. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

"What? Oh. Yes. Yes, I think I...did?" Lucretia shakes her head, pursing her lips. "Now I have to figure out what to do with it."

"Well, my mom always used to keep her souvenirs on the mantle," Avi says, and Lucretia almost bursts out laughing.

"Thank you, Avi, I'll take that under consideration." She thinks for a moment, collecting her staff from the cannonball behind her. 

_That's something from outside. Like you._

Like the Hunger.

"Avi," Lucretia says, slowly, "I...have reason to believe...that -"

Thankfully, she doesn't have to find a delicate and professional way to say 'I think there might be another Big Bad on the horizon, but I have nothing to go off of other than a weird vision and an offhand comment from a goddess who's cryptic at the best of times, so I don't actually have any useful information to give you in order to prepare you, but just try to...generally be prepared', because it's just then that the entire moonbase shudders underneath her feet.

...

The news doesn't say anything about the Hunger being back.

It also doesn't say anything about mysterious invisible attackers from another dimension, thousands of spying eyes in the sky overhead, or disembodied shadows. It _does_ have plenty to say on the subjects of out-of-season, out-of-control wildfires in Colorado, flooding in Wisconsin, and a plague of worms that seems to be attacking Kentucky. And the usual evil political leadership, apocalyptically bad international relations, nightmare climate change scenarios, and investigative report on how your toothpaste is slowly killing you, chased by a dissonantly cheerful 'human interest' story about a five-year-old who invented a better container for hard-boiled eggs.

Joaquin flicks the TV off in disgust.

"Hey, are you burning shit again?" he calls into the kitchen, where he's pretty sure Carlos was making a sandwich. There's not a lot to burn on a sandwich, but the smell of smoke is sudden and acrid and if anybody could burn a sandwich, it's Carlos.

"Fuck you," Carlos calls back, without venom. "Come make your own lunch, if you're so much better at it."

"I am so much better at it," Joaquin says, ignoring his brother's response as he turns to his Twitter feed. He'd kind of assumed Twitter would already know about it if the Hunger was back, he's been checking anxiously every couple of minutes since he got home last night, only pausing to sleep, but there's been nothing. Radio silence.

Maybe he'd imagined the shadow in the street. Maybe it'd been cast by something else - a bird or a drone overhead, a light pole, something normal. Maybe it's okay. Maybe it really is all okay, forever.

Joaquin's seen too much shit go wrong lately to believe that. But fuck it, he really, really wants to.

"Hey," he calls into the kitchen. "You got lots of readings to do?"

"Mm? Nope," Carlos answers, distractedly. "Why, you want a cooking lesson?"

"Ha ha," Joaquin yells back. "No, I was thinking I could kick your ass in Mario Ka-"

He stops, mid-sentence, cut off by the crackling.

"Joaquin?" Carlos calls, from the kitchen, after Joaquin doesn't say anything for a moment. "Hey, you alive out there?"

He rounds the corner from the kitchen, sandwich raised to his mouth, and freezes, staring at Joaquin. A huge glob of jelly slowly oozes out the bottom of his sandwich, before falling to the floor with a wet, sticky _splut_. He doesn't seem to notice.

Joaquin looks down at his own hands, at the arcs of red lightning jumping from finger to finger, and then back up at his brother.

"I think we have a problem," he says.

...

"I don't know," Barry is saying when Kravitz opens the portal. "It just shouldn't be possible, I mean, the lack of magic to anchor the soul to a phylactery alone -"

"Oh hey, bone daddy," Taako says, looking up, and Kravitz is immensely grateful that bone doesn't show his blush. "What's cookin'?"

"Sorry, Taako, I don't mean to interrupt your visit, but I'm actually here for your sister and brother-in-law," Kravitz says. He puts his face back on to lean down and give his boyfriend a kiss, though. He's not metaphorically heartless, only literally.

"Duty calls, huh?" Lup sighs, but she makes no move to unfold herself from the overstuffed couch she's sprawled out over. "Hey, maybe we should ask Skeletor here, he might know."

"Ask me what?" Kravitz says, looking around the room. "Oh, Magnus. Hello. Didn't see you there."

Magnus waves, in place of a greeting. There are crumbs in his beard, and his cheeks are puffed out like a chipmunk's. Kravitz watches as he steals another meringue off the elegant silver platter on the low coffee table, and looks away before Magnus can stuff it, too, into his mouth. "There was something you wanted to ask me?"

"Yeah, actually," Taako says, his gaze curiously intense. Kravitz holds eye contact as he reaches down for a meringue. He gets plenty of opportunity to sample Taako's masterful cooking, of course, but that doesn't mean he's going to pass this one up. Even missions from the Raven Queen herself can wait a minute or two for one of Taako's meringues. "You ever heard of there being liches on the Plane of Thought?"

Kravitz drops his meringue.

"That shouldn't be possible," he says, a little hoarse.

"Whoa, deep breaths," Lup says. "It's that big a deal?"

Kravitz takes her advice, drawing in a deep breath to compose himself before he speaks. "Well, no. It can’t be done. I would assume it was a hoax, a red herring, an urban legend -"

"But fomefing'f got you fpooked," Magnus says, through a mouthful of meringue, spraying sugary crumbs over the coffee table. It's only a year and a bit of exposure therapy that helps Kravitz contain the flinch.

"The Raven Queen herself just sent me to call you back." He nods to Lup and Barry, the latter of whom nods back and the former of whom flashes the peace sign. “She’s received word that something is wrong within our planar system. Something that’s even affecting Fate. And she’s one of the few gods whose emissaries can travel between the planes.”

Kravitz wonders, idly, what the word is for a group of significant looks. Personally, he likes the sound of 'a flock of significant looks', given how they fly around the room.

"Guess we know where our next road trip's gonna be to, huh, babe?" Lup says, stretching out one leg and gently smacking Barry in the shoulder with her foot.

Barry smiles. Despite the fact that it's pleasant and mild, and that the face it's on seems built for amiability, there's something about it that makes Kravitz think it is not a nice smile.

"Let's go kick some undead ass," he says, pushing himself to his feet, and then, "Oh, and Taako, Magnus, you're both invited for dinner Sunday. Babe, you said you wouldn't let me forget."

Lup shrugs one shoulder, her face melting off to reveal gleaming bone. "I didn't have to, you remembered all on your own." She reluctantly unfolds from the couch, reaching up and pulling a scythe with a flame pattern printed on the edge of its glossy black blade from thin air. Even though technically skulls are always grinning, somehow she seems to be grinning more than usual. "That is never going to get old."

"You'd be surprised," Kravitz says, drily, and opens a portal.

Or, at least, he swings his scythe to open a portal. But the blade only swishes harmlessly through thin air.

...

_“Hey guys, Storm here. Uh, just wanted to give you a quick update - next week's video's gonna be a little late. Before you ask, yeah, everything’s fine, I’m just dealing with the fact that life is short, unpredictable, uncaring, and meaningless.”_

_:laughs:_

_“Anyway, we’ll be back to your regularly scheduled Hollow Knight playthrough next week. If you’ve got any suggestions for what I should play next, then drop a comment below! And for the last time, buttlicker69, stop suggesting Undertale. I already_ did _Undertale, and I’m not ‘revisiting’ it like seven months later just because you’re horny for the skeletons._

_“Well, I think that’s about it for now. I’ll see you all next week. Oh, and don’t forget to like and subscribe!”_


	6. Chapter 6

It's been said that every villain is a hero in their own mind.

That isn't quite true. But it is true that no one starts out believing that they're in the wrong. They think they're doing the right thing, or the wrong thing for the right reasons. Or that it's their right to do the wrong thing.

That, or they don't realise how close they are to doing the wrong thing until it's too late.

Delia Shelley would consider herself a good person.

Well, okay, a basically decent person. ‘Good’ might be overreaching it a bit, but she wouldn’t consider herself a _bad_  person.

Definitely not a villain.

...

“Dungeons and Dragons,” Marial repeats. She hopes it sounds sarcastic. She wants it to sound sarcastic.

“Excuse me?”

Marial starts, but it’s just one of the international students, standing beside her table and giving her phone a disapproving look. When she sees she’s got Marial’s attention, she says, “Are you talking to a ghost only you can see and lamely pretending you’re just talking into your phone?”

Marial looks reflexively over at Dead Guy Gary, who seems just as shocked as she feels.

“Because if you’re not, then you’re using your phone, and there’s no phones allowed in the quiet study area,” the international student finishes, and Marial breathes out a sigh of relief.

“Right. Sorry. I’ll just, uh, I’ll take this outside.” She points at her phone with one finger, then looks into the middle distance, saying into the microphone, “Yeah, I’m just in quiet study, I’ve got to pack my bags up. I’ll call you back.”

She makes a show of hanging the phone up and starts stuffing books into her satchel, motioning as surreptitiously as she can manage for Dead Guy Gary to keep talking.

Thankfully, he takes the hint. “You’ve seen some weird news stories around recently, right? Probably thought they were fake.” He lets out a good-natured half-chuckle, half sigh. “I used to think that most people would, if they saw something clearly ridiculous being peddled as the truth, but...guess I was wrong about that one.”

Marial sniffs, but whoever’s smoking a cigarette must have stubbed it out already. The smell dissolves quickly into the reassuring dry scent of old books and an even older heating system.

“They’re not fake,” Dead Guy Gary continues, and his voice drops into this chilly register that makes all the hair stand up on the back of Marial’s neck. She throws her satchel over her shoulder and crosses the quiet study room as fast as she can, suddenly feeling uncomfortably exposed in the open space. The confines of the stairwell aren’t much better, but at least her hackles settle down a little as she trudges down the familiar steps. “Every one of those weird stories is a result of wild magic. I recognised it because I’ve been studying the 5e sourcebooks, my daughter wants me to run a campaign for her and her friends but the last time I DM’d it was for 3.5e and they’ve made some real big changes -”

Marial fumbles her phone out of her pocket, holding it to her ear as she fixes Dead Guy Gary with a look. “Okay, that’s adorable, but I only recognised about half of what you just said, I’m not sure some of those things were even words, and I have _no_  idea what any of it has to do with you being dead. Also, I assume you already know, but you are a gigantic nerdlord.”

“Yes,” Dead Guy Gary says, pleasantly. “I have been told that.”

“Okay,” Marial says, feeling a little off her footing. “Good. Then I don’t have to tell you again. That would’ve been a real inconvenience.”

She takes a breath in, and asks, “So what’s a 3.5e?”

...

The engineers are in a panic when Lucretia makes her way down to the lower levels. She can hardly blame them - the entire moonbase is shuddering and lurching in the air, trying to gain altitude even as it drops by leaps and bounds.

“Madame Director!” her head engineer gasps, face falling at the sight of her. “Please, we’re working to locate the source of the problem, but - it’s not in the mechanical components, everything is working fine, so the issue must be -”

“Magical,” Lucretia finishes for her, just as the moonbase drops, a jolt that lifts her abruptly off her feet. She manages to keep her balance when the backup thrusters catch the base, with a put-upon whine, but Avi and the head engineer aren’t so lucky. 

Lucretia crouches down to help the head engineer to her feet, ignoring the way the whine from the backup thrusters keeps rising in volume and pitch. She straightens up again, mind whirling, trying not to think of pillars of darkness smashing into the world around her, trying not to think of anything but what to do next.

“Here,” she says, and raises her staff. 

She’d intended to cast Levitate on the moonbase, just to stabilise it until the engineers can figure out what’s gone wrong with the magic keeping it aloft. But nothing happens.

\- _pillars of darkness_  - 

Lucretia tries again, and again, but there’s nothing. It’s not simply a matter of failed rolls, of used spell slots. She reaches out for magic she knows she should have, and there’s nothing _there_.

\- _colour and light fading, just enough to notice, the world desaturating_  - 

“Take us down,” she snaps. The head engineer jumps.

“Madame Director -”

Lucretia rounds on her. She feels as though her eyes must be spitting sparks, crackling red lightning like Lup’s or Barry’s when they’re really losing it, but her voice stays level and precise as she says, “We don’t have any magic left. Take us down, _now_ , before we fall out of the sky.”

The head engineer looks up at her, for a moment, frozen, and Lucretia sees a helpless kind of terror reflected in her eyes. It’s a terror she knows well.

Then the gnome gives herself a shake, and spins to look out over the vast boiler room. “You heard the lady!” she yells, and all the scurrying figures below freeze in the middle of their frantic action. “Emergency landing protocols! Now! I want us on the ground in five!”

There’s a beat, a moment of dead stillness, before the boiler room explodes into furious action again. Lucretia leans heavily against her staff, for the second time that day. She must be getting old. 

“Madame Director?” Avi says, carefully, behind her, and Lucretia heaves a sigh, straightening up slowly. 

“I suppose we’d better let everyone know what’s going on,” she says.

It would help, she thinks, as she starts back towards the elevator, if she knew what was going on herself. 

...

Kravitz only stops slashing his scythe through empty air when Taako puts a hand on his arm.

“Hey, take it easy, big guy,” Taako says, holding down Kravitz’ arm when he tries to raise his scythe for a fifth time. “Think the, uh, uh, the drapes have been menaced into submission.”

Kravitz looks helplessly down at the scythe in his hands. He forces himself to take a deep breath, one he doesn’t strictly need. The panic buzzing through him is too familiar, but the hand on his arm is warm and steadying, not dragging him down.

"I'm not getting through either," Lup says, and if _Lup_ sounds worried then something is seriously wrong. "Hey, Ghost Rider, this happen often?"

"No," Kravitz manages, gripping the scythe in his hands until the wood creaks warningly in his grip. "This shouldn't be happening _at all_ -"

"Hello? Can you hear me?"

The small, high, unruffled voice of Angus McDonald cuts through the tension filling the parlour like a very sharp knife through candy floss. Angus emerges from a doorway a little to Magnus' left, a slight frown on his face and a Stone of Farspeech in one hand. He gives it a little annoyed tap with his other hand, the one that’s holding what looks like a silver compact, and then holds it up to his mouth again. “Can you hear me _now_?”

There’s a fizzle and a pop from the Stone of Farspeech, a sliver of a voice that sounds like the necromancer Lucas Miller saying something unintelligible, and then, the stone falls silent.

Angus looks up with a worried expression. “I charged this last night, sirs! It shouldn’t be out of magic yet! I think something must be interfering with -”

The rest of his sentence is cut off when the compact in his hand suddenly flips itself open, and an enormous plume of choking grey smoke explodes out of it.

Kravitz moves faster than he thinks he’s ever moved in his life, pushing Taako back as he readies his scythe to swing. Beside him, he can sense Lup and Barry moving too, the thread of the Raven Queen’s consciousness that binds them all to her employ as good as a sixth sense. Across the room, he can see Magnus moving, too, ready to attack or to defend. 

But - there’s nothing to fight. It’s just smoke. Just a wall of sour, bitter smoke that settles over the room and hangs there, making it hard to breathe, blurring the edges of everything until the entire room disappears into a series of dull, shifting shadows. Kravitz keeps his scythe ready and his senses peeled, feeling like something terrible is about to step out of the smoke, but nothing ever does. There’s just the suffocating stillness, and the sharp smell of burning, and a faint susurrus like voices on the very edge of hearing, and the longer it goes on the heavier Kravitz’ scythe seems to weigh on his arms, the more exhausted staying alert seems to leave him. 

There’s something terrible coming, something dreadful hiding just within the curtain of dull smoke, but he won’t be able to see it until it’s upon him. Why, then, even bother trying to be ready for it when it comes? Why even bother trying to fight? He doesn’t have a chance. And even if by some miracle he does best this foe, there will always only be another one to fight, another necromancer to take down, another lich to battle. He has to be good - or lucky - every time he goes into the field. They only need to be lucky once. And long after he’s dead - again - they’ll just keep coming. And coming. And coming.

He’s so tired. He’s never been so bone-deep tired. Even when he died, he’s never felt this tired.

Somewhere in the fog of whispers, there’s a short, sharp, _click_.

It might have been days or only minutes before Kravitz is aware of someone shaking his shoulder, of the voice Taako uses when he’s trying not to sound worried very close to his ear. “Hey, Krav? Kravitz? Anybody home? Alas, poor Yorick?”

Kravitz blinks. When he takes a breath, it’s cool, clear air.

“What...” he starts to ask, sitting up. There’s still a faint dirty haze hanging around the ceiling, but otherwise the parlour’s back in the shape it was before the smoke bomb in the shape of a compact went off. Magnus is sitting with Angus, who’s rubbing his eyes under his enormous glasses, and there’s a faintly-shimmering bubble of magic wrapped around the compact, which is now closed.

“Oh good, I was starting to think - to wonder if I could still date a, a handsome coma patient,” Taako says, and Kravitz looks down, almost surprised by the hand Taako’s left clutching his. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it might be nice not to have to hear you talk about work all the time, but Taako can’t be seen on the red carpet without some serious arm candy.”

Kravitz looks around, and finally notices who’s missing. His brain seems to be several steps behind the rest of him. 

“Lup and Barry?” he asks, and Taako squeezes down on his hand harder than ever. 

“Gone to put the hurt on the dickwad who pulled this little stunt, babe,” Taako says, a vicious snap in his voice. “They got their mojo back after Magnus shut that thing.” He nods in the direction of the compact, and Kravitz can’t help thinking that Magnus, the fighter, wouldn’t have been able to cast an isolating bubble like that. And Taako almost looks worried, and - is that a lock of hair out of place? 

“You were really scared for me, hm, love?” Kravitz says, leaning in to brush that lock of hair back into place, and Taako’s eyes narrow.

“Say that again and I’ll fill all your pockets with pudding, _capische_?”

Kravitz laughs under his breath, and finally feels the last of the - fear? Exhaustion? Anxiety? Misery? - that the smoke had filled him with clear away. He breathes out, long and slow, leaning forward to press his forehead against Taako’s. 

“What _was_  that?” he asks, finally, when he feels like he can draw breath without choking again.

“Well, I think we were kind of hoping you could tell us,” Taako says, glancing over at Magnus on the couch. “Djangus had a theory about, uh, about a lich on the plane of thought? Ever met a lich that can do that?”

Kravitz shakes his head.

“I’ve never met _anything_  that can do that,” he says, slowly. 

He wishes he could say something, anything, that would erase that line of worry from between Taako’s eyes. 

...

“...so anyway, that’s basically how character stats work with rolls,” Dead Guy Gary finishes. Marial nods, because she isn’t sure what else to do. She’d asked for this, after all. 

“Okay. So, the million-dollar question: how is this made-up tabletop game related to you being dead and ghostly and me pretending I’m talking to somebody on my phone like I’m in some kind of late-nineties supernatural TV show?” she asks, interrupting before Dead Guy Gary can launch into an explanation of advantage and disadvantage on rolls. She really didn’t need to know how to _play_  D&D to understand the basic point he was trying to make. Although it does sound a lot easier to play than she’s always thought. And like it involves a whole lot less math. Actually, it might even be fun - 

“Oh!” Dead Guy Gary looks like he’s reaching up to adjust his glasses, but Marial’s pretty sure he doesn’t have any. “Uh, I don’t really know _how_ , but - I’ve done some experiments, and I don’t think I’m a ghost.”

“You don’t,” Marial says, staring pointedly through his abdomen at the sign for the campus library behind him. When Gary doesn’t say anything, she reaches out as sarcastically as she’s able and puts her arm through his chest.

“Yeah, okay,” Gary says, and it sounds from his voice like he’s rolling his eyes. “But I really don’t think I’m a ghost. I think - I think, somehow, I’m a lich.”

Marial stares blankly at him for a moment.

“Like...like the Lovers, from the Story and Song,” Gary sighs, running a hand over his head like he’s running a hand through the hair he doesn’t have. 

“ _Oh_ ,” Marial says. “Like Lup.” 

Gary’s face lights up. Literally - it glows a ruddier yellow. “Yeah, like Lup. The big deal is, a lich is anchored to a phylactery - that’s an object they hide their heart in. If that gets destroyed, they’re SOL. And I’m...” He gestures towards Marial’s hand, still sticking through his chest.

“Wait, you want to me to find an object you stuck your _heart_  in?” Marial asks. She’s suddenly rethinking having given this guy the time of day.

“Not my literal heart!” Gary argues. “It’s kind of a metaphorical, metaphysical, magical -” He huffs out a sigh. “Can you please just go find my tracksuit before somebody throws it out?”

Marial has to bite down on the inside of her lip to keep from laughing. Of course he’d hide his heart in his tracksuit. What a dork.

She’s so entertained by the thought that it takes a moment for the other thought to reach her. Which only means that when it does, it hits with staggering force. “Wait, do you mean the tracksuit you _died in_? The one that’s presumably locked up in the hospital morgue somewhere? If it isn’t still on your _corpse_?”

Gary smiles grimly. “That’s the one.”


	7. Chapter 7

_"So, Griffin. I have a question."_

_"Mhm?"_

_"So this old guy -"_

_"I beg your pardon?"_

_"Sorry,_ _Dad_. _So this sprightly youth of about forty-five, fifty years old - he thinks he's a lich?"_

_"That's right, Trav, well done for catching that. I know I made that one kind of hard to puzzle out, you know, with him saying it and everything -"_

_"That's not my question, okay! So he wants to find his phylactery and make sure it doesn't get destroyed."_

_"Yes."_

_"Griffin?"_

_"Yes?"_

_"Since when have our liches had phylacteries?"_

_“...”_

_“...”_

_"Well, they've - they've had them all along, Travis. I can't believe you don't remember that."_

_"Really."_

_"Mhm!"_

_"So...what're Lup and Barry's?"_

_"Well, now that's a - very personal question you're asking there. I'm not surprised they didn't tell you,_ Magnus _."_

_"Oh! Oh, Trav, he got you good!"_

_"So that's how you're gonna play it, Griffin?"_

_"Yep, I think that's how I'm gonna play it."_

_"All right, Griffie, just remember, this is how_ you _wanted to play it."_

_..._

"Ahoy! Taako! I have a question of great import!"

"Yeah, homie, what's crackalackin'?" 

"What's your sister's phylactery?" Magnus asks, reaching for another meringue.

Taako blinks at him.

"Okay, first of all, I'm frankly a little suspicious why you'd even see the need to ask that," he says, raising one finger in the air. "Second of all, what's that got to do with the, the price of eggs?"

...

_"Seriously, Juice? I thought you were on my side here!"_

_"Oh, I am, I am. Justin's all for making our beloved baby brother sweat. But, uh,_ Taako _just got asked a very weird, very personal question, and I don't have to tell you that shit's already pretty weird, sooo..."_

_"This is about the character voices, isn't it."_

_"Travis, my dear brother...it has always been about the character voices."_

...

"Well, Barry mentioned it, when we were talking about the whole lich-on-the-plane-of-thought thing, and I thought, and I don't know a lot about necromancy, but I thought maybe if there isn't magic on the Plane of Thought, maybe whoever it was turned themselves into a lich...here. And maybe they left it here, to make sure it wouldn't get...I dunno, de-magicked? So maybe, if we knew what kind of thing we were looking for -"

"We could find it and smash the shit out of it before things get any more, uh, uh, buckwild around here," Taako says, tapping a finger against his chin in thought. Magnus takes advantage of the opportunity to stuff the entire meringue in his mouth. "Not a bad - not a bad plan at all. So we're back in the old saving-the-world business, huh?"

"Wookf wike it," Magnus says, and swallows the last of the meringue. "Think we should give Merle a call? Y'know, get the band back together."

"Hmm," Taako says, thoughtfully, still tapping his chin.

...

_"Yes! Yes, you should! Come on, throw your poor old dad a bone here."_

...

"He's been pretty busy with that whole adventure camp thing," Magnus says, uncertainly.

"Oh, for sure, for sure," Taako agrees. "And trying to be a good father to the children he basically abandoned."

...

_"Oh, come on, now that's just dirty pool!"_

...

"And running an entire earldom? He's a busy man. We shouldn't be calling him up to bother him over every little, uh, every problem that comes our way," Taako finishes, decisively.

He looks over and meets Magnus' eyes.

"I've got his Stone of Farspeech on speed-dial," Magnus says.

...

The call goes to voicemail, again.

Liliana frowns at the device in her hand, before ending the call.

"Maybe he's still asleep," Rowan suggests uncertainly.

"Nope, he said he wanted to come meet the one and only Joaquin with us," Liliana says, unable to keep a hint of disdain out of her voice. "Can you just drop me at his apartment? Something here's not right."

"It's a quarter mile out of the way," Rowan starts, sounding annoyed, then glances over and sees Liliana's face. He sighs, and merges into the left lane. "Fine. But I'm going to drop you off and keep going, okay? Time may be of the essence."

"Sounds like a plan," Liliana says, already looking down the street for Storm's apartment building. 

With the traffic, it ends up taking almost ten minutes to get there. Liliana piles out of the car at a red light and walks the last block to Storm's building. She rings the buzzer, and waits, tucking her hands under her arms and stamping her feet. September's cold this year, and the wind howling down the back of her neck has a bite to it. She hopes it's not going to rain.

Finally, Storm's voice echoes out of the little speaker by the door, tinny and hollow. "What."

"It's me," Liliana says. "Open up."

There's a groan from the speaker before it abruptly goes dead. The door doesn't buzz. Liliana gives the handle a tug, but it doesn't budge.

She lays on the buzzer again, jamming her thumb against the button marked with Storm's name until her knuckle aches. She doesn't let up until the speaker crackles to life again. "All right, all right! Fine!"

Storm's apartment, when he opens the door for Liliana, is dark. "Hey, I didn't say you could come in -" he starts, as Liliana shoulders past him into the entryway. Liliana ignores him. 

She sighs at the closed blinds, the pile of dishes in the sink, the unmade bed, the overflowing trash cans, the collection of half-drunk water glasses sitting on the bedside table. "That bad, huh?" she asks, as she pulls open the living room curtains. Storm winces when the light flows in, but he doesn't try to stop her.

"I'm fine," he says, defensively. "I'm dealing. You saw the news, didn't you? You know what our miserable fucking excuse for a government did -"

"I sure do. And I know sitting alone in a dark room feeling sorry for myself ain't gonna make it better," Liliana says, shortly. 

"Nothing is," Storm says, his voice bitter and brittle, and Liliana pauses in her quest to get some sunlight into his apartment to look over at him. He won't meet her eyes. "Nothing is going to make anything better, do you understand? Sense hasn't saved us, law and order haven't saved us, knowledge, kindness, solidarity _definitely_ haven't saved us - the wheel is spinning into misery again, and there is nothing that can stop it now except time. And even that - eight years! We got eight measly years to breathe in, and even that was too much, and now we're paying for it just like we always have, and we'll pay for it and pay for it and _pay for it_ -"

"Just so you know, you stopped making any sense about four sentences ago," Liliana says.

Storm looks her in the eye.

"The only governing force in the universe is entropy," he says. 

"That's an interesting theory," Liliana says. "That why you haven't done dishes in a month?"

"They'll just get dirty again! And then they'll have to be washed again, and it's an endless cycle that just wastes precious, finite energy, and then you _die_ , and you've wasted your whole life washing dishes, and -" Storm protests, and then stops, finally seeming to hear how ridiculous he sounds. 

"All right," Liliana says, taking pity on him. "Why don't you give that therapist of yours a call, and while you talk to her, I'll take out your trash and clean up in here. It's not gonna make the world a better place, I know, but it will make the immediate future suck a little less." She waves a hand in front of her nose. "Been burning incense in here again? This place reeks like an ashtray."

"It's against the lease," Storm says, hollowly. "Like most other small pleasures that would make life feel more like it was worth living."

"Jesus, you're a cheerful guy today," Liliana says. "When's the last time you slept?"

Storm doesn't answer, but his silence is glowering and guilty. Liliana nods. "All right. Call your therapist, then go take a nap."

"What's the point?" Storm mutters. "This is just how reality works. What's she going to do about it? Tell me lies to try to make me feel better? Tell me to lie to _myself_ to try to feel better?" His voice goes even smaller, quiet enough that Liliana has to strain to hear it. "Maybe it's a good thing we opened that circle. Maybe we should just leave it open and hope it destroys us all."

"Oh, for -" Liliana starts. 

She doesn't get a chance to finish, though, because the fire alarm goes off.

...

It's a beautiful day at Bottlenose Cove. They've mostly been beautiful days so far, at least the ones that Merle's been in town for. 

...

_"Finally! And here I was starting to think you boys had forgotten about me."_

_"Well, Magnus and Taako have been trying to call you all year, Dad, it's not their fault you keep forgetting to take your stone off silent."_

_"Oh, sure, you can_ say _that -"_

_"Listen, old man, I will personally walk through your phone settings with you_ right now -"

_"Hey guys? Hey? Hey guys? Hey guys, wanna play - hey, do you guys maybe wanna play some D &D?"_

...

Extreme Teen Adventures keeps him away from home for weeks at a time, of course, out in the wilderness far from civilisation, where you can't even get a decent signal on a Stone of Farspeech -

...

_"Oh, sure, all gang up on the old guy, why don't you? I hope you all remember who gave you life!"_

_"Well, Dad, technically -"_

_"I contributed half the genetic material!"_

...

\- _but_ Merle's finally got a week or two of well-earned vacation, and, as he drops his bags on the front steps of his cliffside manor and turns to survey the tiny beach earldom laid out before him, he decides he's going to spend as much of it as possible lying on the sand, in the sun, not moving. The water is a perfect crystal blue, little rippling waves sparkling in the light, the sun hammers warmth into the top of Merle's head and shoulders under his Hawaiian shirt, the sky is an unbroken dome of pure lapis fading almost to white around the horizon, unblemished by even the faintest wisp of cloud -

And the moon's falling out of it.

Merle blinks, raises a hand to shade his eyes, but the moon's still there and it's still falling. He can see its shadow, now, a little dark disc in the middle of the water that's growing bigger and wider by the second. The moon itself is getting bigger, too, and the closer it gets the more Merle can see. It's a little reassuring to know that the actual moon isn't about to drop on Bottlenose Cove, but seeing the Bureau of Benevolence moonbase dropping towards him at high speed isn't exactly a reassuring sight, either.

"Dad?" Mavis asks uncertainly, and Mookie shouts, "Cool!" Merle gathers them both close to his sides, as much to reassure Mavis as to make sure Mookie doesn't go charging down the beach and get squished by the falling moonbase. 

A few heartbeats pass, Merle holding his breath as the shadow covering the beach grows bigger and bigger, before the moonbase crashes into the water. 

The impact is deafening. The spray reaches all the way up to the manor steps, spattering a fine cold mist across Merle's face. Mavis' arms tighten around his waist, and Merle gives her an unthinking pat on the back.

Once the wave that the moonbase's splashdown landing had kicked up onto the sand starts to retreat, Merle finally loosens his grip on his kids' shoulders. 

"We - we should go see if we can help," Mavis says. "If there were people in there -"

Merle just nods, and grabs his backpack back up from the porch.

By the time he gets down to the beach, the party's pretty much over. Half of Bottlenose Cove has swarmed out of their homes to come help evacuate the slowly-sinking moonbase, and rowboats and Fanta-Sea-Doos are already ferrying people with silver bracers to shore. The glass cannonballs have been repurposed as lifeboats, bobbing on the waves in random patterns, and Merle catches the eye of someone waving from inside one of the glass globes. It's Avi, looking just a little too cheerful for somebody whose flying house just crash-landed in somebody else's cove. Merle follows his line of sight, and realises Avi's looking past him, at Chesney's up the beach. Well, that makes sense, then.

One of the other globes, one that's a little closer to him, gets caught up in the breakers near the beach, and there's a chorus of yelps as it topples over, spilling its passengers into the surf. Merle hurries down the beach, thinking of riptides - but by the time he reaches the water, several people in extremely sodden blue-and-white robes are already dragging themselves out of the ocean. There's a lot of embarrassed laughter, and one of the people who'd spilled out of the cannonball flicks her hair back over her shoulder.

"Lucretia!" Merle calls, and she turns. "Long time no see!"

Lucretia turns, and her smile grows sheepish.

"Merle!" she calls, raising a hand in greeting. "Hope you don't mind us, uh, dropping in."


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I have to apologise for the unannounced, unexpected hiatus. I found out by trial and error (mostly error) that I can’t consistently update two longfics while also consistently working on a novel. I’m going to finish this and Something Borrowed, Something Blues, but after that, I’m planning to take a step back from fic to focus more on my original fiction. I hope you’ll check out my [tumblr](http://marypsue.tumblr.com) or my [novel's blog](http://katesummervsthemultiverse.tumblr.com) if you’re interested in what I’m getting up to!

Joaquin's fingers are spitting red sparks.

They fizzle out about a foot away from him, which is a relief - at least the house isn't going to catch fire - but, well.

"Does this mean the Hunger's back?" Carlos demands.

"Dude. Do I look like I know?" Joaquin yells, his voice going frayed and pitchy right at the end, moving like he's gonna grab the sides of his head and then thinking better of it.

"You're the one who's best interplanar buds with a literal wizard!" Carlos grabs the dishtowel that's hanging from the fridge handle and swats, ineffectually, at Joaquin's sparking hands. Julia, who's been surprisingly chill this whole time, suddenly lets out an excited bark and launches herself off the couch at the dishtowel.

"Hey!" Carlos snaps, trying to pull it back, but Julia's got her jaws clasped in the faded fabric and she's not letting go. They play a furious game of tug-of-war for a few seconds before Carlos finally gives up, letting go of the towel. It falls limp in Julia's clutches, and she gives Carlos what he swears is a smug look, trotting daintily back over to Joaquin with her trophy and curling up beside him with her head on her front paws to watch the fireworks.

"Stupid mutt," Carlos mutters, but Joaquin's smiling. He reaches down to give Julia a pat on the head, and then frowns at his still-sparking hands, obviously thinking better of it. 

Carlos rolls his eyes. "Hey, don't encourage her!"

"She's a very good girl and she can have that dishtowel, it's full of holes anyway." 

"Yeah, like I'm gonna use it to dry my hands on when it's been in your canine's stinky mouth," Carlos mutters. "Seriously, is the Hunger back? Do I gotta dig out my baseball bat with nails in it?"

Joaquin frowns. "You don't have a baseball bat with nails in it."

"Yeah, but it'd be a dope-ass weapon though if I did, right?"

"You'd probably spray-paint it pink," Joaquin says.

Carlos considers this for a moment.

"Yeah, definitely," he says. "Sick as hell, fool."

Joaquin looks like he can't decide whether to collapse into hysterical tears or bust out laughing.

He's spared having to do either, though, when the doorbell rings.

Carlos meets Joaquin's eyes, and Joaquin stuffs his hands behind his back at the same time Carlos makes for the door. Through the peephole, Carlos can make out a tall, nervous-looking black man on the doorstep, shifting from one foot to the other as he looks around. He's wearing street clothes - actually, ridiculous goth clothes - and it looks like he's alone, but Carlos still leaves the chain on as he eases the door open a crack. "Whadda you want?"

The guy on the doorstep meets Carlos' eyes, and breaks into an astonished smile. "I, uh, I'm looking for Joaquin Terrero? My name's Rowan. I was hoping he might be able to answer some questions I have about magic."

He peers around Carlos' shoulder, into the living room, where the pillows and dishtowel and Carlos' dishes and bright red raspberry jam are still scattered around looking like somebody had been murdered in the middle of a nice lunch, at Joaquin standing in the middle of the room with his hands tucked guiltily behind his back, at the flurries of red sparks bursting from behind Joaquin's back every few seconds, and asks, "Is this a bad time?"

...

"I really do apologise for turning up like this," Lucretia says, from somewhere within the pile of Merle's fluffiest robe. "And for - for dropping an entire moonbase on your - charming little coastal hideaway, here." She pulls Merle's robe closer around herself, shivering a little. "It's very good of you to open your home to us all."

"Well, you know, double-you double-you pee dee, right?" Merle says, setting the teapot down on the table in front of Lucretia. "That's What Would -"

"Pan Do, yes, I recall the...lovely bracelet you gifted me last Candlenights," Lucretia says, a little too fast. "Still, we...did destroy a good section of your coastline. The delicate marine environment -"

"Lucy," Merle starts, settling heavily into the other end of the couch Lucretia's perched on, like she might take flight any moment. "The thing is - can I call you Lucy?"

"Please don't," Lucretia says.

"All righty then," Merle says, undeterred. "The thing is, Lucy, you made some decisions that weren't yours to make. And you did some things that really hurt a lot of people -"

"I know," Lucretia says, very small, from within the collar of Merle's robe. "And I take full responsibility for -"

Merle raises a hand, cutting her off mid-sentence. "But when you get right down to it, we all did that, in those hundred years, one time or another. And we're family. We've always been family, blood or not. So we can sit here and split hairs about who did what and who deserves what, or we can have some tea and you can tell me what the heck happened to make you drop a moonbase on my innocent, unsuspecting cove."

...

_"And we're just gonna say she fills him in on what you boys already know about her side of things, okay? This is already going way longer than I planned for when I was writing this show and -"_

_"And you already have to pee?"_

_"I really really_ really _have to pee, Justin."_

_"Okay, but Griffin, you agreed that this wasn't going to happen at any more live shows -"_

_"Travis, it's a simple question of how much of the rest of these two hours you want to spend sitting on stage with a brother who has peed, not to put too fine a point on it, in his MeUndies."_

_"Well..."_

_"In his uniquely comfortable microfibre_  underwear _, Travis."_

_"Okay, well, when you put it_ that _way -"_

_"And this has - this has been the - the Money Zone, huh, Ditto?"_

_"See, I knew you boys would come around. Okay, pretend Lucretia's telling Merle all about her encounter with Istus and the moonbase magic failing, I will be right - back - !"_

_"Man, I hope he remembers to turn his mic off this time."_

_..._

"Hello? Yeah, is this Doctor Shelley? I think it's an emergency."

The voice on the other end of the line isn't one that Delia knows. Annoyed, she glances at her watch. She's got half an hour until her next appointment, hardly enough time to decompress and prep. "I'm so very sorry, I don't know how you got this number, but I can't take emergency calls from people who aren't my patients. I have an appointment with a patient. If you stay on the line, I'll transfer you to the 24-hour suicide helpline -"

"No, not for  _me_ ," the voice says, like it should have been obvious. There's a shuffling sound, some muffled protests, and then a voice Delia recognises as belonging to Storm Bellwether, who  _is_  a patient, comes on the line. 

"... not going to do anything but delay the inevitab- OW, Lili, what the fuck!"

In the background, Delia can hear the first voice say, "Now tell the nice lady what you just told me, okay?"

There's a grumbling silence on the other end of the phone line. Delia checks her watch. Twenty-five minutes.

"Storm?" she asks. "What's going on?"

What happens next isn't entirely clear. One minute, Storm is calmly and confidently explaining that the mess his head is in is simply the result of being trapped in an ever-cycling reality where the only constant is misery and no positive gain or progression is ever anything more than illusory because the fundamental and inescapable human attributes of hatred and fear and greed always inevitably destroy whatever might be worth living for, if whatever had been worth living for hadn't been secretly terrible in the first place, which is far from a new concept that Delia's never encountered before. She's well used to talking clients through this train of thought, this shouldn't have been an issue, she should have been able to get Storm to a stable point and ask whoever his friend is to bring him to the hospital - except that that's when things go weird.

"It's all right, Dr. Shelley," Storm says, still in that clear, confident, untroubled voice, and there's something deeply disturbing about that even as Delia wants to be reassured by it. "You've tried to teach me how to accept and deal with the things that I can't change. I appreciate it, I really do. But you see, I don't need that anymore."

"Storm," Delia says, gripping the phone so hard she can hear the plastic creak. "Don't - I hope you're not planning anything -"

"Stupid?" Storm laughs, pleasant and amused, maybe even cheerful. Delia can feel her fingers starting to go numb from how tightly she's holding the phone. "Don't worry, Dr. Shelley. I'm not removing myself from the equation."

The sudden burst of smoke is sharp and acrid and foul, like a saw across Delia's senses. She coughs as it sandpapers the back of her throat, blocking off her air.

Delia drops the phone, fanning the air in front of her face, but the choking smoke doesn't clear. She doubles over, coughing, one hand scrabbling for the phone receiver with the strange, impossible idea that if she hangs it up, the smoke will stop. Maybe the smoke is cutting off oxygen to her brain, but she could swear it's not coming from any flame, but pouring from the holes in the receiver.

The distant corners of the room are starting to go fuzzy, whether from the thick clouds of smoke piling up or from her own oxygen-starved brain. The receiver slips from Delia's grip and skitters off the desk, dangling over the edge by its cord. Delia grabs at it once, twice more, before the strength slips out of her arms and she collapses back into her office chair.

In the moments before she loses consciousness, she thinks she hears Storm's voice, tinny and small through the phone's receiver, say, "I'm going to change things. I'm going to change  _everything_."

Then the smoke closes in on Delia, and everything goes black.

_..._

_"Okay, quick, while Griffin's in the bathroom, what do you guys think is going on in this campaign?"_

_"Hm, good question, Trav, but it sounds to me like you already have a theory or you wouldn't be asking. So maybe we should, uh, should turn this one back around on you. What do_ you _think's going on?"_

_"Well, I don't buy this lich stuff. It's too easy. I think it's a red herring, like the red robes were in the first Balance arc."_

_"So you're saying...you think there_ is _a lich. But it's not what we think it is?"_

_"Yeah Dad, y'know, like...Ditto's kinda been building it up like this lich thing is the big issue, and I don't buy that. I bet that the lich thing is more like, like a symptom, or something, of the thing that's really going on?"_

_"Oh, like a red herring."_

_"Yeah, Dad, I literally just said that."_

_"Well, I didn't hear you!"_

_"Didn't hear - you've been sitting right beside me for the last three-quarters of an hour -"_

_"I was looking for my dice! Have either of you seen - it's the purple sparkly one with twenty sides, you know -"_

_"Your D20, Dad? The - literally, the dice you use for_ every roll _-"_

_"Well, if I'd_ had _a chance to make a roll before now, maybe I'd know where it was!"_

_..._

The hospital is bustling, people in scrubs and soft-soled shoes hurrying through the halls, waiting rooms packed solid, nursing stations bustling. It's no problem for Marial and Dead Guy Gary to sneak in, though a few people do stop and shiver when they accidentally pass through Gary's spectral form.

It's slightly more of a problem trying to find the morgue, though the floor plan included on the helpful 'what to do in case of fire' placards by the elevator help. Marial gets turned around twice and once reads the plans wrong and tries to convince Gary that they need to go to the second floor, rather than the basement.

"I'm not good with directions!" she hisses, under her breath, as they finally approach the door to the morgue. 

"No offence, but that's the understatement of the year," Gary mutters. "Oh, great, it's a card lock. Any ideas about how we're gonna get in?"

Marial surveys the lock. It is, as Gary noted, a black card reader with a red light on the top of it. She has no idea how to get it open.

"Okay, here's the plan," she says, mind whirling like it's 2am the night before a paper's due and she hasn't even finished the outline. "We go back upstairs. I find a doctor. I distract them while you...magic hand, or whatever, steal their ID card. We'll leave it down here when we leave so it looks like they lost it -"

"I'm still not sure why you couldn't just sign in at the front desk as one of my relatives and collect my belongings," Gary says, sounding annoyed.

"Because I'm not one of your relatives, obviously," Marial says. "Now come on, let's go find a -"

The door to the morgue swings open, nearly bashing Marial in the face. The scrubs-clad man who'd opened it stares down at Marial, confusion and annoyance starting to deepen into suspicion. "Can I help you?"

Marial swallows.

"Uh," she says, glancing over at Gary. "I, uh."

She sighs. "I'm the niece of Gary..."

"Brown," Gary hisses.

"Gary Brown," Marial says. "I'm here to collect his belongings."

The scrubs-clad man gives Marial a narrow-eyed look, then says, "One moment," and vanishes back into the morgue. The door slams shut behind him.

Marial slaps a hand to her forehead, letting out a groan. "Not one word," she warns Gary. 

"Who said anything about telling you so? Because I don't remember saying anything about telling -" Gary starts.

"Move!" Marial screams, throwing both arms out like she can physically push him. Gary takes one startled step backwards, just a sliver of a second before a scytheblade slices down through thin air where, a second before, his head had been.

A scytheblade, Marial notices through the haze of panic, with a flame pattern painted along the sharpened edge.

"Well, would you look at that, babe," a voice says, a voice that's so familiar even if Marial's never heard it in person before. She turns around, putting her back to the door to the morgue, and comes face-to-face with a grinning skull. "Looks like Koko and Maggie were right after all. We got a lich infestation on the Plane of Thought."

The blade of Lup's scythe flashes as she raises it high for another strike.

_..._

_"Anyway, I don't think liches are really the problem. Like the big bad that we're actually gonna have to fight will turn out to be...Upsy, or something."_

_"Oh, shit! Plot twist!"_

_"Yeah, uh, Upsy, Your Lifting Friend, learned necromancy from that dick Lucas or something, and now he's breaking down the barriers between planes so he can, um..."_

_"So he can...lift...people from one plane into another?"_

_"Oh, yeah, that's good."_


	9. Chapter 9

"...from wildfires in northern California and the Rockies. The smoke is expected to start to move in by Monday, when this warm front here sweeps through, pushing it in front. As you can see on the map, here, it's tracking south and east over the weekend, reaching us late Sunday night. Visibility will be reduced, and motorists are advised to make sure your lights are on. Air quality advisories are in effect for the following regions..."

...

_“Ooh, Griffin, did you prep that sound clip just for this live show?”_

_“Glad you asked, Travis, that’s actually a clip from an actual weather report last week. You will notice that my voice is not in fact that of a middle-aged woman.”_

_“Well, it’s ominous as fuck. I’ve got goosebumps.”  
_

_“Yeah, Ditto, those sound effects sure are effective when you remember to use them.”  
_

_“That was_ one time _!”_

...

There’s a sudden burst of pain as something bangs into the back of Marial’s head. For one panicked moment, she thinks this is it, she’s finally been Final Destinationed, and even if being taken out by one of the Seven Birds is cool as fuck in concept, in reality, it actually kind of sucks.

Then she hears the morgue-doctor-guy’s voice behind her. “Hey, they said you didn’t check in at the - holy  _fuck_ , what the shit is -”

Marial doesn’t wait for him to finish the sentence. She grabs the door and yanks it the rest of the way open, shouldering the guy out of the way as she barrels into the morgue. The guy starts yelling after her, something about how she can’t do that, but Marial ignores him. All he’s got on his side are hospital security, and they aren’t right behind her with giant magic knives on sticks. 

There’s a  _clang_  and some yelling behind her, but Marial ignores it, skidding around a corner into what looks like an office crossed with a mad science lab. She’s not sure what she’s looking for - probably some kind of locker, or something? They wouldn’t have just left the dead guy’s clothes on him, would they? They’d do, like, an autopsy if a perfectly healthy guy just dropped dead for no reason, right?

“ _Please_  do not make me have to strip a corpse,” she mutters under her breath, throwing open steel drawers and cabinets at random. “Oh god. Okay. Not that one.”

“Looking for this?”

Marial looks up, directly into the grin of a robed skeleton. 

As she watches, it holds up a bundle of neon fabric and waves it tauntingly above her head, like nothing so much as a dog owner with a treat. Maybe that’s why Marial does the stupid thing.

She doesn’t waste time going for the tracksuit. Instead, she launches herself upright, aiming the top of her head at the underside of the skeleton’s chin. They connect with a  _crack_ , though it takes a moment before she feels it, like somebody’s rapped her sharply on the top of the head with a hammer. 

The skeleton’s head snaps backwards, with a surprised noise somewhere between a pained grunt and a yelp, and Marial shoves it right in the middle of the chest with both hands, as hard as she possibly can.

The robed skeleton stumbles back, flailing at thin air. As if she’d planned it that way all along, the arm holding the bundle of fabric whips right past Marial’s nose. All she has to do is hold out her hands and the skeleton’s windmilling arm  _thwap_ s the tracksuit right into them. 

“Dead guy!” she screams, pivoting on one foot and barreling back towards the door. It feels like it takes an hour just to get turned around, like she’s pushing through thick syrup. Marial expects, any second, for a bony hand to close on her arm, or a scytheblade to cleave through her back. “I got it! Go go  _go_!”

“I have - a name!” Dead Guy Gary yells back, from the doorway. The morgue attendant or whatever that guy is called is standing pressed flat against the wall, the expression on his face that of a man whose worst fears and wildest dreams are both coming true at once, and honestly? Marial can relate. 

She shoulders past the morgue attendant guy and out into the hallway - only to duck back inside as a fireball the size of a large dog comes screaming down the corridor and singes her eyebrows off. 

“Oh. shit! They’re  _both_  here?” she demands of Dead Guy Gary, who shrugs both incorporeal shoulders. 

From behind her, a voice heavy with eldritch harmonics hisses, "Yes...they... _are_."

Marial turns, slowly, clutching the bundle of tracksuit to her chest.

Stalking down the hall from the morgue is the robed skeleton Marial had stolen the tracksuit from, eye sockets glinting with red light. As Marial watches, flesh drips horribly down over his bare skull, revealing the glowering face of Barry J. Bluejeans. The non-skeletal face of a grumpy Tom Arnold-looking motherfucker really shouldn't be more terrifying than an animate skull with a red glow in its eyes.

"And I dunno, babe, but it sure looks to me like we've got 'em surrounded," Lup says, from the doorway. Marial spins, sees Lup leaning against the doorway tossing her scythe from hand to hand with catlike deadly casualness. The grin she's wearing is somehow more sinister with flesh than without it. And -

"Oh my god, she's even hotter in person," Marial breathes. "Annnnd...she wants to reap my immortal soul. This is not fair."

"Can you please focus?" Gary snaps. "Trying not to die, here."

"Yes, okay," Marial sighs, though honestly, she's going to have to get Gary to check his priorities. Once they are out of here and not dead, that is. Or at least not any more dead than they already are.

The morgue attendant guy whimpers, from Marial's right, and she realises she'd forgotten he was even there. 

"Is this about that time I tried that guy's brain?" he squeaks, and honestly that's weird enough that Marial has to turn and get a good look at his face, even in the face of advancing, certain death in the form of an excruciatingly attractive reaper and her endearingly dorky husband. Priorities. "It was only one bite! I just wanted to know what zombies are always so fired up about! Please!"

"You do know that's how you get prion disease, right?" Gary points out, even though the morgue attendant guy doesn't seem to be able to see or hear him. "Like, you're a medical professional. You should know this." 

"Okay, weird, creepy, and deeply unethical, but probably not a crime against the natural order of life and death. They're not here for you, dingus," Marial says, though privately she agrees with Gary. "They're here for us."

"Got it in one," Lup says, raising her scythe. The flames painted along the edge begin to flicker, and then, suddenly, the whole blade is wreathed in crackling flame. 

"Say goodnight, lich," Barry says, from behind Marial, and there's a noise like a sword being unsheathed that Marial can only assume is the sound of his scythe being pulled out of whatever hammerspace dimension he normally keeps it in.

Marial looks frantically around, but they're trapped in the narrow hallway, between a reaper and a hard place. There's no way out. This is the end of the line. She's lived nearly a full year on borrowed time, but - it's over. And now she and this dude she just met today are both going away for death crimes. For eternity. No chance to appeal; no hope of parole. Just because, for no apparent reason and through no fault of their own, they'd died (or at least had their heart stop), and then failed to stay dead. 

It's not fair. It's not fair, and it's not right. 

A pulse of heat races through her, and Marial realises she's not just scared anymore. She's also furiously,  _incandescently_  angry.

Lup's scythe sweeping down seems to move in slow motion, trailing sparks as it tears through the air. The flames flapping off of it like pennants are turning invisible around the edges, shading into blue as they draw back towards the blade. The rest of the world fades out around her, going wispy and grey, until the shining, fiery blade is the only colourful thing left.

Marial throws out both arms, palms out, like she can stop the descent of that blade through her will alone. Absently, she notices that the sleeves of her red windbreaker seem to be wrapped around her arms, even though she hadn't worn it today. Her fingers are grey and ghostly like the rest of the world, trailing wisps of white from briefly-glimpsed bone. As Marial watches, though, their tips begin to flicker, to dance with orange sparks.

"No," she says, and her own voice hisses and thrums in the strange silence.

The fireball that rips from Marial's hands is big enough that, for a moment, she feels her face sear. Lup barely has time to look surprised before the wall of flame slams into her, throwing her backwards. The blast throws Marial back, too, like she's been punched in the chest, knocking her to the floor. It takes the morgue door clear off its hinges, warping and charring the metal frame.

When the curling smoke clears, Lup is nowhere to be seen.

The alarm on Marial's defibrillator suddenly kicks in, a piercing beep echoing through the tiny hall. It quickly mingles with the shrieking wail of the hospital fire alarms, the sprinklers turning on with a hiss and putting out the last few lingering tongues of flame licking at the doorframe.

Marial claps both hands over her mouth, partly in horror, partly to keep her lunch down. "Oh my god oh my god, I killed Lup, I killed -"

She stops, frozen, when the blade of a scythe presses underneath her chin, forcing her head up and back to meet the red-flashing eyes of an enraged Barry J. Bluejeans.

"What did you do," he hisses, and Marial gives a choked yelp as the blade digs into the soft flesh under her chin, something warm and wet starting to creep down her neck. "What did you do to her!"

"I don't know, please, I didn't mean to -" Marial gasps, struggling backwards, boots skidding against the lino as her hands scrabble at the blunt edge of the blade. She's sharply aware of how close she is to getting her throat slit, but all she can think about is how surprised Lup had looked - "I don't know! I didn't want to hurt her!"

"Okay, enough," Dead Guy Gary says. "Look, I'll surrender, okay? It's me you're here for, anyway. I'll come without a fight. Don't hurt the kid."

"Yeah, I mighta actually bought that, too, if Little Miss Sunshine here hadn't just  _torched_  my  _wife_ ," Barry growls. "Don't try and play dumb with me. You -  _both_  of you - are the liches we came looking for."

Marial meets Gary's eyes, sees her own fear and confusion reflected back at her. Out of the corner of her eye, she vaguely notices the morgue attendant booking it out the obliterated door, but nobody pays him any attention.

"So. You're going to tell me what you did to Lup, so I can get her back," Barry says, in what would probably be a pleasant, conversational tone of voice if his teeth weren't gritted and he didn't have a huge fuckoff scythe blade dug into Marial's throat. "And then all three of us are taking a nice little trip to the Eternal Stockade -"

"All right," Gary sighs. "I was really hoping we could talk this through, but - fine."

He raises both arms, and a red glow begins to gather around his outspread hands and the black holes of his eyes.

Barry tenses, and so does Marial, but Gary doesn't blast them both into oblivion like Marial's half expecting. Instead, the red glow fades, and Gary slowly lowers his arms, his heat-vision-skull face grim.

Marial's heart sinks towards her Doc Martens.

"What -" Barry starts, but he's cut off by a metallic  _bang_.

For a long moment, no one moves. Marial strains to hear over the alarms going off all around them, but she can't make out any sound like it. The blade at her throat pulls away, slightly, as Barry's grip relaxes, Marial guesses because he's also looking around for the source of the sound. She inches backwards, scooting her butt along the linoleum, but pulls up short when her back bumps against Barry's shins.

Then there's an explosion of sound behind them, from the morgue proper, a hollow banging and thumping like a football team beating up an army of unsuspecting trash cans. It's accompanied by a moaning and groaning that belongs in a Romero flick, and, finally, a shriek of tearing metal.

"Oh, you fucking -" Barry starts, and Marial drives the back of her head into his kneecaps. He yelps, staggering back, and Marial narrowly ducks the wild swing of his scythe, sticking an arm out behind her. By some miracle, it collides with Barry's ankles, and there's a brief moment of confusion before he goes over backwards in a tangle of limbs.

"Come on!" Gary yells as Marial scrambles to her feet, scooping up the tracksuit as she does. "I don't know how much control I've got over them, and I don't feel like sticking around to find out!"

"Control over - did you raise the  _dead_!?" Marial demands. She pauses in the doorway just long enough to glance back and see Barry J. Bluejeans getting to his feet, a huddle of greyish, blank-eyed people pouring out of the morgue behind him. One of them still has an open Y-incision in his abdomen, dripping bits of viscera as he lurches forward. "Oh Jesus H. Christ on a fucking bike, you raised the dead!"

"Well, I can't exactly touch anything, now can I?" Gary says. "Had to make do. Now come on! Let's get out of here!"

The alarms scream overhead as they barrel out into the main hallway. The beep from Marial's defibrillator bores into her brain like a drill, constant, shrill, and relentless. She stuffs the tracksuit up against it, trying to muffle it, but it doesn't do much good.

"Is there any way you can turn that thing off?" Gary demands, as the stairwell door slams shut behind them.

"No," Marial says, pausing just long enough to suck in a huge, terrified breath before she starts up the concrete steps. She's aware that she's starting to babble, but she can't seem to stop herself. The beep is worse in here, echoing and echoing, building on itself until it's all but unbearable. "I have to go to the hospital when this happens, it means my heart rate went dangerously low and I couldn't be paced out of it or I've had a shock because it stopped altogether, they have to check me out and make sure I'm all right and there's a device they use to turn the alarm off -"

"We are  _in_  the hospital," Gary points out.

Marial blinks. Reminds herself to breathe.

"So we are," she says. "Okay. Third floor."

...

"Yeah, he's not picking up, muchacho. I'm thinking maybe we're on our own for this one."

"Try him again," Magnus says. "You know Merle, he probably forgot to take his Stone off silent -"

There's a sudden yell, and Lup appears out of thin air in a burst of brief flame, flying backwards until she slams into Taako's couch with a  _thump_  that knocks the couch over onto its back and sends it skidding backwards for a full foot and a half.

"Oh, hey, Lulu," Taako says, after a moment of frozen silence has passed. "Nice of you to, uh, uh, drop in."

There's a groan from the wreckage of the couch, and Lup extends an arm, one finger unfolded from her fist. Magnus breathes a sigh of relief. 

"Well, you were sort of right," she says, as Magnus and Taako help her up out of the couch, or what's left of it. There's soot all over her face, and she only smears it when she drags the back of one hand across her eyes. "There isn't  _a_  lich on the Plane of Thought."

"There's two liches?" Magnus asks, just as Lup says, "There are two of them." She shoots him a look that's halfway between annoyed and amused, which is fair, considering Magnus did just snipe her goof.

"Yeah. Two of them," Lup says, brushing soot off the dark robe that's her work uniform and the ripped black jeans that almost certainly aren't. "A man and a woman. The man's down a body but the girl's still in hers. Though maybe not for long. I dunno what she hit me with, but it must've been powerful, to throw me all the way back here."

Taako and Magnus exchange a look.

"We gotta get in touch with Merle," Magnus says, finally.

"Oh, is he  _still_  not picking up his Stone of Farspeech?" Lup asks.

...

_"All right, all right, you've made your point. Now will you all stop ganging up on the old guy already?"_

_"Only if you let Travis turn your ringer back on, Dad."_

_"It's annoying! And it's never anybody I want to talk to."_

_"See, now, that's just hurtful."_

...

The fire alarm shrills angrily through the office.

Dr. Shelley’s private office, when Byron throws the door open, stinks of acrid, bitter smoke. The corners of the room are indistinct in a grey haze, but there’s no sign of a fire anywhere.

Byron hurries over to help the doctor, who’s struggling with one of the windows. Together, they manage to pry it open, letting in a breath of air. Even the unfortunate olfactory portrait of a busy metropolis is a relief, compared to the reek of that smoke.

“What happened?” Byron  asks, and the doctor makes a face, waving a hand in front of her nose. 

“Aromatherapy experiment gone wrong. I don’t believe I’ll be incorporating  _that_  into my practice anytime soon.” She gives a little laugh, crossing the room to the other window. “Would you see if you can get that alarm turned off? Sylvie should be here any moment for our session.”

“You got it,” Byron says, starting for the door. He glances at the doctor’s desk as he passes, but there’s no obvious residue of scented candles or incense or anything else that might have been burning. He does notice that the doctor’s phone is off the hook, though, and gently places it back in its cradle.

“Oh, and Byron?”

Byron turns, to see Dr. Shelley standing by the window. She’s got a strange smile on her face, and - the way the light’s coming in through the window, the way it’s casting shadows on the planes of her face and falling across her irises, makes her eyes almost seem to glow a pale, unsettling grey.

“Make it quick, will you?” she says, and Byron can’t explain the shiver that rolls down his spine as she adds, “We’ve got a lot of people to help.”


	10. Chapter 10

Liliana can't breathe.

She feels pretty stupid about it, actually. She knew there was probably some kind of evil wossname from beyond their plane of existence on the loose, using the circle she herself had broken to get in and eat the universe. She smelled smoke as soon as she set foot in Storm's apartment - hell, she'd taken the batteries out of his smoke detector when it had started going off - but saw no sign of candles or incense or anything that might be causing it. And now she's choking to death on evil smoke from somewhere beyond her plane of existence. Who could  _possibly_  have seen this coming.

Well, serves her right. She just hopes the others don't find out how she got killed, she'll die of embarrassment.

"It's all right," Storm says, somewhere in the whispering haze, his voice friendly and comforting, smooth and even and easy to listen to. For the first time, Liliana understands why other people waste their time watching Storm play video games. "You never really had a chance. None of us did."

"Don't...patronise me...you little asshole," Liliana coughs out. She knows as soon as she does that she's made her fatal mistake. Should have saved her breath instead of trying to be a smartass one last time. Her lungs burn, her throat is on fire, her vision blurry either from the tears stinging her eyes or the clouds of billowing, soft grey smoke tracing hypnotic swirls through the air. Her knees, then her shoulder, smart as she hits the ground, but even that's muted, muffled somehow by the smoke.

"It's useless trying," Storm says, sympathetically. "I understand now. No matter how hard you fight, no matter how many battles you win, there's always something bigger and worse waiting in the wings. You can fight and fight your whole life, and any ground you might gain will just be taken back after your death. It means nothing." His smile is bitter and aching. "All you're doing is wearing yourself out, trying to fight the inevitable. You can rest. It'll all be over soon."

Liliana sucks in one final breath, preparing to curse Storm out, but all she gets is a lungful of bitter smoke. Distantly, she thinks she hears Storm say something about endings or silence or some edgelord crap, but it's impossible to make out over the rising whispers. The edges of her vision are darkening, tunneling away into pinpricks of grey as the smoke steals her oxygen. Her last, fleeting thought is to hope somebody will figure out something happened to her and check up on Mavis and Mookie before they both get so hungry they try to eat each other.

And then there is light.

...

The Plane of Thought is home to all kinds of fantastic inventions. Its inhabitants have shaped metal and lightning around ideas that, on other planes, would have been accomplished with advanced spellwork.

And they've managed to come up with things that the other planes would never dream of. Stones of Farspeech are a complicated enchantment capable of incredible communication across continents. But no one, yet, has thought to connect them all together so that the same messages can reach everyone, all over the world, at nearly the speed of light. And no one, yet, has engineered a twenty-four-hour news cycle to make sure those messages get hammered, repeatedly, into every mind around the world. Over, and over, and  _over_  again.

"...new report indicates that, without dramatic policy and industry changes, global temperatures will rise enough to render the Earth uninhabitable within the next thirty years..."

"...despite widespread protest, the unpopular piece of legislation was passed on Friday. Legal challenges are expected..."

"... natural disasters compounded by extreme weather..."

"...allegations of sexual misconduct dating back to the early nineteen-seventies..."

"...will walk free..."

"...unable to afford the necessities of life..."

"...human rights violations..."

"...hate crime rising..."

"...unexpected cancellation of hit series  _Ray Donovan_..."

"...corruption..."

"...collapse..."

"...devastation..."

"... _despair_..."

...

"Yes," the man at the door deadpans. "This is a bad time."

"Oh," Rowan says. "Sucks to suck, huh?"

"Yeah," the man at the door says, and shuts it in Rowan's face.

Rowan stares at the door. The door does not stare back at Rowan, because it's an inanimate object. That should mean it can't laugh at him, either, and yet, somehow, that's exactly what it seems to be doing. 

From somewhere behind the impossibly smug door, Rowan can hear another voice - familiar, but in the way the voice of a teacher you had in elementary school is familiar - complain, "What'd you do that for?"

"He can come back with a warrant," the guy who opened the door snaps, and then the conversation veers into Spanish that's a little more advanced than what Rowan vaguely remembers from eighth grade. 

Rowan stands on the doorstep for another moment or two, feeling the hot flush of embarrassment creeping up the back of his neck. The door does not reopen.

"Okay," Rowan mutters to himself, turning away from the door. He does not add, "Now what?". He's uncomfortably aware that no one else is going to answer that question for him. "Well, shit."

He starts down the walk, vaguely considering whether Liliana will be upset if he shows up early to pick her up. He doesn't like to admit it, but something about that Storm guy she hangs around with makes him indefinably but distinctly uncomfortable. Nothing personal, just...Rowan gets the strong impression that the guy's watched  _The Craft_  one time more than is strictly healthy.

Maybe Indigo's home. Maybe all that reading she - or he, or maybe they, Rowan hasn't checked in yet today - did on the D&D planar system will give him some clue. Rowan's still not sure if Gary Gygax was just plugged in to some fundamental truth of the universe, or if something about the Story and Song somehow  _made_  D&D-like shit real, but the end result is the same. Rowan's extensive knowledge of the Wiccan and neopagan traditions is less useful, practically, than some nerd with a 5e Monster Manual.

He has to admit, it does sting a little.

He's halfway down the walk when the door behind him swings open and a voice - familiar, but in the way that a celebrity's voice is familiar - calls, "Hey, do you really know anything about magic?"

Rowan turns. Joaquin Terrero waves one red-sparking hand at him.

“Sorry about that,” he says, looking at his own hand. “I can’t, uh, make it stop.”

"Well, shit," Rowan says.

...

_"Hey, Griffin. Question."_

_"Shoot."_

_"Are we...are we going to get to...fight something, at some point?"_

...

The alarm on Marial's implant cuts out abruptly as she and Dead Guy Gary reach the third floor. 

Gary gives her a hopeful look, but Marial shakes her head. "It'll keep going off. Every four hours." She's exhausted, and her left arm is starting to ache, her fingers numb and tingly. She keeps jumping at little noises, thinking it's either Barry or one of Gary's zombies, and she's shaking so badly that it takes her three tries to turn the handle on the door out of the stairwell. This is really too much excitement for one lifetime. 

...

_"Yes, you are. In fact, you're going to get to fight something very, very soon."_

_..._

Lup gives her scythe a sweeping stroke through the air. There's a noise like paper tearing, and a burst of stinging grey smoke billows out of the hole she's cut into the Astral Plane. It disperses quickly, but leaves a bitter smell lingering in its wake.

"Well, that's probably not a great sign," Lup mutters, under her breath, and then ducks through the opening in the air.

Taako turns to Magnus, but Magnus isn't there. Taako just sees the soles of his boots following Lup through the hole in the air. His voice drifts back through the planes. "Taako! Are you coming?"

"Let me just - let me ask you something. What part of 'Taako's good out here' keeps giving you all so much trouble?"

Magnus doesn't answer, just leans back through the hole in the air, grabs Taako by the collar, and yanks him through.

The hole in the air closes seamlessly behind them.

_..._

_"Okay, but Griffin, how soon is 'very, very soon'?"_

_..._

"What  _is_  all this commotion?" someone asks, pleasantly, as Marial slips out of the stairwell. "I thought we dealt with the fire alarm. I've lost two appointments already."

Marial mutters a curse under her breath. She’d really hoped the alarms would have cleared everybody out, but the professionally-(if garishly-)dressed woman with her dark hair in a sleek coil at the back of her neck leaning against the reception desk is standing between her and the cardiac clinic. And doesn't look like she's about to evacuate anytime soon.

On the other hand, Marial's a patient here, and she has a legitimate medical concern. And whoever this is doesn't seem like she wants to stop doing her job and leave until she can personally see flames licking out of the walls around her. Maybe Marial can use this to her advantage.

She takes a step forward, already working up a sheepish smile and a story about a mispulled fire alarm, and the woman standing by the reception desk turns to meet her eyes.

Marial stops in her tracks.

There's nothing immediately and obviously wrong with this picture, which makes it worse. Marial finds herself searching the woman's expression of detached, professional curiosity as it fades into concern, her carefully-applied makeup and enormous eighties Jem and the Holograms earrings, the hall around the reception desk, the friendly but confused smile from the guy behind it, for something to explain the sudden wave of sickening dread that crashes over her. Marial ends up studying the helpful sign listing directions to the different departments so that she doesn't have to meet the woman's kind grey eyes. She's never noticed before that psych and cardiac are on the same floor.

"Can I help you?" the woman asks, and the hall seems to bounce it back to Marial strangely, giving it a mocking, sarcastic tone.

"I - I don't think you can, actually," Marial stammers. She can  _feel_  the way Dead Guy Gary's gone tense beside her, prickling like a wall of static shock. She wants to ask him if  _he_  can tell what's got his back up, but something tells her that talking to thin air in front of this woman would be a bad idea. "I need the cardiac device clinic."

The woman smiles, broadly, stepping away from the reception desk and towards Marial. Marial takes another step backwards.

"I think what  _you_  need is a little dose of perspective," the woman says, still smiling, still friendly. That strange mocking echo in her voice seems to be growing stronger, picking up harmonics from somewhere. Marial takes a third step backwards and finds herself backed up against the stairwell door.

_..._

_"Well, uh, right about - right about now, actually."_

_..._

The Astral Plane is spooky.

Well, okay, so a place where dead people go to their eternal rest is always gonna be spooky, but the Astral Plane is spookier than necessary. The last time Magnus saw this place, it was through an enormous gemstone mirror, but it had seemed...peaceful. With the whispering ocean of souls, even a little bit...tropical? Of course, your umbrella and swim trunks would have to be black, but - yeah, he could imagine taking a beach vacation there. A very, very creepy beach vacation.

But this time, as he follows Lup across the dark, formless ground and waits as she chooses where to slice open another portal, Magnus can't imagine the pina colada that would make this palatable. It's just so  _quiet_. The shifting sea seems to be still for once, and he doesn't think it's his imagination that the ethereal blue light it casts is getting dimmer and dimmer. If Magnus squints, he thinks he can make out a faint grey haze casting a pall over it and soaking up its light. He's willing to bet actual human currency that, up close, it smells strongly of smoke.

"Hey, uh, Lulu?" Taako asks, and though his voice is deliberately nonchalant, Magnus can hear the tightness in it. "You done something new with the place? Really working the, the old, 'abandon hope all ye who enter here' vibe."

There's a little frown creasing the space between Lup's eyebrows as she glances distractedly back at them.

"Look, I've been a reaper for less time than you've been dating one," she says. "But no. I don't think any of this is right."

Magnus rests a hand on the head of his axe as he looks around, just in case.

There's another burst of smoke that leaves them all coughing when Lup opens the portal to the Plane of Thought. It still dissipates quickly, but the smell seems to linger longer this time.

They're in a wide, airy, square hall, its walls painted a pale yellow, a huge plate-glass window overtop of a desk just beside them. There are printed signs labeling everything and offering directions down the hall, and all put together, it reminds Magnus of the Halls of Healing back in Neverwinter.

"This better not take too long," Taako complains. "I have an, uh, a guest appearance on, uh, uh, uh, Beat Bobby Mindflayer booked for tonight -"

"It's gonna have to wait," Lup says, warningly.

Magnus follows her line of sight. 

The three people standing by the heavy metal door don't seem to have noticed them yet. As Magnus watches, though, the figure to the left - the  _skeletal_  figure, flickering in and out of visibility and crackling with red lightning - slowly, slowly turns, and stares directly at him. He's unmistakably a lich, but instead of the red robes Magnus is used to, or even the traditional necromancer's black, he seems to be wearing an extremely ugly neon tracksuit.

The woman standing beside him, in the day-glo suit and enormous earrings, also turns in their direction, and Magnus stumbles backwards. She's got to be the female lich Lup had mentioned, the one who still had her body. There's just something about her  _eyes_  -

The girl standing between the two neon horrors half-turns, her breath catching in her throat, her eyes wide and frightened. That's all Magnus needs to see. He pulls his axe free, and, ignoring Lup's shout of "Magnus, wait -", rushes in.

The frightened girl, the one Magnus had pegged as a helpless captive, throws up both hands. And then she throws a fireball the size of a basketball down the hallway at Magnus' head.

_..._

_"I'm gonna need you boys to roll initiative."_


End file.
